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Are women psychoanalysts more or less creatively productive than men in our field? If a gender difference in productivity exists, then what are contributing or causal factors? This article will present a pilot project to study one aspect of possible gender differences in analysts' productivity, and then will look at some possible explanations. The discussion will raise questions about differential opportunities for women analysts, differential interests and their relation to publication patterns, practical and psychological consequences of feminine role norms, and dynamic factors in feminine psychology which may influence productivity.
How might we measure creativity among women analysts? Innate creative capacities of any individual and the actual productivity of creative work by that same individual can certainly differ. Furthermore, in an analyst's professional life there are many ways in which creative capacity might be expressed, such as in clinical work, teaching and supervising, in the development of new ideas expressed verbally, and in published work. Gender may influence actual effective productivity at any of these points. For example, the relationship between the sex of the therapist and psychotherapeutic effectiveness has begun to be studied (Mogul, 1982). A few papers have addressed the issue of the effects of gender factors on the clinical course in psychoanalysis (Tyson, 1980; Viederman, 1976; Blum, 1971; Greenacre, 1959a; Karme, 1979). This article examines the relation of the analyst's gender to her/his professional creativity in a specific limited area: published productivity in two leading American psychoanalytic journals. The underlying issues will then be discussed.