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The consecutive psychoanalytic treatments of Mr. G by a male and then by a female analyst offer a unique opportunity to study the effect of gender on the analytic process. The patient was transferred because the male analyst relocated to another country and had an “intuitive sense” that Mr. G could benefit by continuing his analysis with a woman. The two analysts have similar theoretical orientations and are the same age, both 10 years older than the patient.
As a result of the rich developments in two-person psychology and gender studies, we can no longer view the analyst as a blank screen, as one who can conduct an analysis that could be reproduced by anyone of equivalent training and experience. Nor can we continue to believe that the gender of the analyst does not significantly affect the analytic process in general or the transference in particular.
The concept of the intersubjective field (Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1987; Mitchell, 1988) is a radical paradigmatic shift that offers a very different perspective on the treatment process. The intersubjective field “refers to any psychological field formed by interacting worlds of experience, at whatever developmental level these worlds may be organized” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992, p. 3). It is a system of mutual influence (Beebe and Lachmann, 1988) wherein both patient and analyst turn to each other for selfobject needs and self-enhancing and self-vitalizing experiences, as well as the maintenance and restoration of self-experience.
I will argue that not gender per se but specific ways each analyst “inhabited” and maintained his and her sense of masculinity and femininity