Women Treating Men: Interview Data from Female Psychotherapists

Drawing a provocative parallel between Svengali, Dracula, and Freud, literary critic Nina Auerbach (1981) argues that in the central portrait of the 1890's, “three men lean hungrily over three mesmerized and apparently characterless women, whose wills are suspended by those of the magus/masters” (p. 113). This caricature of masculine domination and feminine submission invites a thought experiment. Imagine, indeed, that Breuer and Freud had been women and that Anna O., Emmy von N., Lucy R., Katharina and Elisabeth von R. of Studies on Hysteria had been men. Would a Frau Breuer have elicited an hysterical pregnancy from an Herr O.? Would a Frau Freud have pressed her hands on the foreheads of her male patients to fight the defense mechanisms? More importantly, would the beginning descriptions of the architecture of the mind or the subsequent theoretical account of the mutative factors of the treatment (both the concepts and the metaphors) have differed if it had been a woman sitting up and a man lying down?

Although the classic psychoanalytic position has been that the gender of the analyst does not significantly affect the analytic process in general or the transference in particular (Kulish, 1984), the alternative view—that the gender of the analyst is of significance in the choice of analyst by patients, in the optimal matching of analyst and analysand, in the development of the transference, and in the outcome of the analysis—has never been entirely quiescent. Freud (1931), in fact, alluded to these issues in his paper “Female Sexuality,” in which he suggested that his women colleagues