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IN THIS PAPER I WILL PRESENT my views on how the gender of the analyst affects treatment. The gender-related experiences I shall describe are likely to remain unknown to analyst and patient alike. Indeed, there are compelling reasons why both will selectively inattend to these experiences.
Any discussion of the impact of gender on the psychoanalytic situation seems at once to be obvious and necessary, as well as unsettling
and vaguely unpsychoanalytic. Let me sketch some trouble spots.
Kulish (1984), in a review of the literature focusing on the gender of the analyst, concludes that "while clinical rules of thumb flourish in this area, no substantial body of research exists to buttress these notions" (p. 108). An example of what she refers to as a "rule of thumb" is the often heard idea that an analysis is more easily initiated with a therapist of the same sex as that of the "less troublesome" parent. This appears to be more valid, Kulish observes, for more disturbed patients. The problem, of course, is that it is often extremely hard to tell which was the more difficult parent until well into the analysis and this is always colored by the enormous subjectivity of what a given patient experiences as "traumatic".