Transferences in Male Patients with Female Analysts: An Update

When eva lester presented her paper, “The Female Analyst and the Erotized Transference,” at the meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in December, 1982, there was only one report in the literature describing an intensely erotic transference in a male patient with a female analyst (Bibring-Lehner, 1936). Lester said that in her own practice she had encountered “only mild, transient, muted, and unstable erotic transferences from male patients” (Lester, paper subsequently published in 1985, p. 284). She asked if others had made similar observations and, in effect, issued an invitation to other female analysts to report their findings. She thereby gave an impetus to others to publish their findings on this previously neglected topic — both of the discussants of her 1982 presentation subsequently wrote papers of their own (Goldberger & Evans, 1985; Person, 1985), and many others contributed to the subject as well (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1984; Guttman, 1984; Kulish, 1984, 1986, 1989; Gornick, 1986; Meyers, 1986a, b; Torras de Bea, 1987; Raphling & Chused, 1988; Chertoff, 1989).