Sex, Gender, and the Analyst's Subjectivity

This symposium provides a ground-breaking discussion of the effect of the analyst as a gendered subject and object on the evolving processes within the psychoanalytic dyad. These papers represent a significant step beyond our usual notions of transference and countertransference. Ruth Gruenthal and Irwin Hirsch have each presented extraordinarily rich, stimulating, and clinically complex papers in which their presence and their experience of themselves as gendered subjects and objects became an important focus of the analytic dialogue. These are original discussions of the relationship among the patient's experience of the analyst's sexuality and gender, the analyst's experience of his or her own sexuality and gender, and the patient's transferential experience of the analyst as a sexual object. The authors struggle to find new ways to integrate their theoretical positions with their subjective experiences of sex and gender within the developing analytic dialogues. Along with the discussions by Sue Shapiro and Alan Kindler, these papers present a fascinating convergence of thought and technique from three separate schools of psychoanalysis: self psychology, interpersonal psychoanalysis, and object relations theory.

Kindler ironically longs for a past when life and psychoanalysis seemed to be much simpler, when we had the certainty of a one-person psychology in which we knew who the patient was and what to attend to in the clinical process. These papers represent a growing awareness of the complexity of the psychoanalytic process in which the concepts of