Cross-Gender Supervision of Cross-Gender Therapy: Female Supervisor, Male Candidate, Female Patient

The current surge of interest in female psychology has implications for both the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Current interest in theories of female development has led to revised notions of what constitutes normal adult femininity. There has also been a recent focus on differences in treatment resulting from the gender of the therapeutic dyad, and an awareness that difficulties in empathy may stem from differences in gender between analyst and patient, just as it may from differences in age or ethnicity.

This paper focuses upon the difficulties the young male psychoanalytic candidate experiences with female patients as he encounters the task of revising his expectations, biases, and theoretical knowledge about women. An even more difficult problem is that of learning to recognize and therapeutically utilize his countertransference reactions toward his female patients' manifestations of aggression and sexuality. It is the proposition of this paper that the female supervisor is uniquely suited to the task of assisting the male candidate to recognize, understand, and modify these reactions.1

Until recently, the effect of gender on the analytic process has been relatively neglected. In part, this reflects a long tradition within psychoanalysis which asserts that the sex of the analyst is of little moment, as the patient will ultimately replicate all important transferential configurations regardless of analyst gender. Currently, however, analysts are finding that qualitative differences may indeed exist and that initial transferences, transferential sequences, and the relative length and weight of various transferential manifestations are influenced by the sex of the analyst (Liebert, 1984;