Postmodern Solutions and the Limit—Opportunity Dialectic: The Challenge of Female Penetration and Male Receptivity

The questions raised by this complex case and highly skillful treatment provide a most intriguing challenge to the current debate on gender (cf. Harris, 1991a, b; Mitchell, 1996). The challenges posed beg to be situated among the many relevant dialectics: biological essentialism and social constructivism, the concrete and the symbolic, and masculine and feminine, to name a few. In addition, differing meanings are attached to the axes upon which these polarities are placed, especially when gender development is refracted through a classical or postmodern lenses. How to position this case on each of these conveyances in order to elucidate the meaning of E's adaptive and maladaptive efforts? How to do this without foreclosing the possibilities offered by a social constructivist position?

This superb treatment is most usefully discussed in two phases, parallel to E's subjective experience as gendered, since E's preoccupations and struggles are fundamentally modified over the years. Though I will take issue with the authors on one way in which the second phase of the treatment has progressed, I believe it is not too much to say that this treatment has saved E's life by guiding him through psychosis to stability.