Cross-Gender Identifications in Heterosexual Couples: Introductory Comments

This paper was written after, but published prior to ‘Aspects of anima and animus in oedipal development’ (Colman 1996) in which I set out to ‘rehabilitate anima and animus for clinical use’. Both these papers represented my personal attempt to integrate Jungian and psychoanalytic thinking in the distinctive tradition of the Society of Analytical Psychology.

Jung's ideas about anima and animus had first inspired my interest in Jungian psychology so I had been disappointed and perplexed when I could not find a way to integrate these ideas with the predominantly object relations perspective of my clinical training. It was through working with couples that I eventually began to recognize Jung's typical ‘pen pictures’ of anima and animus possession and to notice (a) that such people tended to be married to each other and (b) that their difficulties could also be expressed in terms of oedipal development. However, like most of Jung's major concepts, anima and animus are multi-faceted and this way of seeing them as oedipally derived internal objects underplayed their meaning as psychic functions operating as ‘a bridge to the unconscious’ (Jung 1928, para. 339). A subsequent paper, ‘Contrasexuality and the unknown soul’ (Colman 1998) attempted to redress this balance.

Although the clinical material in the ‘cross-gender’ paper is drawn from couple psychotherapy, I had not seen it as primarily about couples but rather as a paper about gender identity. I was sorry that the BJP had published it under the heading ‘couples’ as I thought this obscured its primary intention. This may have been partly due to the relative unfamiliarity and specificity of the couple focus. While the contribution of child psychotherapy to psychoanalytic theory has long been recognized, couple psychotherapy still seems to be seen as merely an ‘application’ of psychoanalysis and its distinctive contribution to the field as a whole is rarely recognized.