Sexual Issues in the Transference and Countertransference Between Female Therapist and Male Patient

It is always difficult to describe a myth; it cannot be grasped or encompassed; it haunts the human consciousness without ever appearing before it in fixed form. The myth is so various, so contradictory, that at first its unity is not discerned: Delilah and Judith, Aspasia and Lucretia, Pandora and Athena — woman is at once Eve and the Virgin Mary. She is an idol, a servant, the source of life, a power of darkness; she is the elemental silence of truth, she is artifice, gossip and falsehood; she is healing presence and sorceress; she is man's prey, his downfall, she is everything that he is not and that he longs for, his negation and his raison d'être.

One aspect of belonging to one or the other of the two sexes is that this membership organizes our perception of ourselves and other people's perceptions of us. Every culture and society develops archetypal images of each sex, that is, generalized representations of qualities and attributes that are particularly connected with one sex or the other, and which are believed to be universally present in every member of a given sex. These images