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What an intriguing possibility—to discuss a case without any reference to the gender of the patient. In the introduction to Psychoanalytic Reflections on a Gender-Free Case, Ellen Toronto and colleagues challenge the reader to contemplate such an endeavor and discover, most likely, one's gender biases as well as anxiety at the absence of such
pivotal information. It is “our hope that by eliminating that crucial piece of information [patient gender] we may be able to isolate and recognize those possibly skewed assumptions that we automatically bring to bear when we learn the designation of male or female” (p. 3).
It is fun to read the case, perhaps more than once as a reviewer might, and realize how many ways and times one can “discover” the gender of the patient—only, soon enough, to realize the facts could just as well be the very opposite. When one accepts that there is no inferring some things, one is freed, not only of the need to know gender per se, but from the futile exercise of trying to understand much about a patient from a cursory history and synopses of two sessions. Although this seems not to have been among the editors' intentions, such an exercise goes a long way toward validating, however indirectly, the unyielding centrality of uncovering the unconscious in psychoanalytic therapy. I will try to explain this observation as I go on to describe the book.
“However, reading the case of T challenges us in our attempt not to foreclose that space. To play in that space without certainty about the gender flies in the face of our culture's compelling need to ‘know’ gender and attach to it many expectations, values and roles” (Donovan, p. 49). “It was fascinating to see how different were my speculations about the meaning of some of the patient's complaints depending on whether I was envisioning a woman or a man” (McWilliams, p. 113). These two editors here offer, in their introductions to three or four chapters each, a continuation of the aim to do something