Gender and Identity Issues in the Analytic Process

Psychoanalysis as therapy was originally premised on the importance of the uncovering and reconstructing of the analysand's past; the emphasis on uncovering and restructuring was strengthened by the early views on transference seen predominantly as the ‘new editions’ of early experience (Freud, 1905). However, the broadening of the understanding of transference and the recent focusing on the role of the countertransference has shifted interest to the re-enactments of past experiences within the analytic space, and to the analyst's affective resonances and interpretive responses to these re-enactments. Thus the meaning of what is being related during the therapeutic hour is not to be extracted solely from the deep layers of the patient's past experience but is equally to be seen as emerging in the subject-to-subject reverberations between analyst and analysand. In other words it is the interplay between transference and countertransference that more and more is seen as the carrier of the therapeutic process.

The emphasis on the intersubjectivity of the two participants in the here and now has been stressed by several writers (Gill, 1982); (Viderman, 1979); (McLaughlin, 1981); (Olinick et al., 1973). The analyst's mental set, his or her regressive potential and diatrophic capacities; the stability and resilience of the working ego and his or her effortless contact with unconscious fantasy, all these enter into the subtle and over-determined interplay with the patient. Put differently, during the hour the patient's inner experience in