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This study tests the hypothesis that female analysts, relative to male analysts, receive a disproportionately small percentage of male referrals. Referral patterns for 170 analysts from four institutes accredited by the American Psychoanalytic Association were examined. One thousand, five hundred and ten patient referrals were studied. The findings were extremely robust and offered dramatic confirmation of our hypothesis. The major implications of the study are as follows: (1) Women analysts receive relatively few adult male referrals, making it difficult for them to gain requisite clinical experience with men. (2) Analysts and nonanalysts alike demonstrate a reluctance to refer male patients to female analysts. (3) Adult referrals, including those made by analysts, are significantly influenced by the issue of gender match between patient and analyst. (4) Analysts' behavior with regard to making referrals does not correspond to explicit clinical theory regarding how analysts make referrals—specifically, the extent to which gender influences the referral process is not adequately described by theory. We believe that these findings are of some concern from the standpoint of analytic education and that they also raise questions regarding unacknowledged
Dr. Mayer is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Psychology Department, and is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco; Ms. de Marneffe is a doctoral candidate in Clinical Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.
This study was supported in part by a grant from The Fund for Psychoanalytic Research. We gratefully acknowledge the continuing interest and thoughtful discussions provided by members of the Workshop on Issues in the Psychoanalytic Training of Women, chaired by Drs. Barbara Deutsch and Helen Meyers, and sponsored by the Committee on Psychoanalytic Education of the American Psychoanalytic Association. We also thank Drs. Barbara Deutsch, Muriel Laskin, K. Lynne Moritz, Barbara Rosenfeld, and Eleanor Schuker, who helped collect our data and whose exceptional efforts contributed to a remarkable 99.8% return rate on the 510 questionnaires employed by this study.
aspects of how gender match between patient and analyst enters into clinical decision making.