What's Disclosed in Self-Disclosures? Gender, Sexuality, and the Analyst's Subjectivity: Commentary on Paper by Samuel Gerson

In the course of working on a thesis designed to gauge whether there were qualitative differences between the clinical work of self-professed analytic feminists working in the relational paradigm and the clinical work of those working in the relational paradigm who did not call themselves feminists, we came upon Samuel Gerson's (1996) “Neutrality, Resistance, and Self-Disclosure in an Intersubjective Psychoanalysis.” In this important contribution to a two-person psychology, Gerson argues that traditional views of neutrality seem in part to have been motivated by misogyny, a fear of becoming enmeshed in the seductions of female patients. Redefining neutrality as a relational event, Gerson proposes the existence of intersubjective resistances and a relational unconscious, the latter defined as a product of the “reciprocal and mutual influence of unconscious minds on one another” (p. 632). Gerson then offers an extended clinical vignette in which he bravely disclosed to his client that he had lied to her about why he had failed to inform her in a