Cross gendered longings and the demand for categorization : enacting gender within the transference-countertransference relationship

B. Tholfsen

Patients who present with overlapping concerns about gender and sexuality tend to believe in a fixed, binary view of gender in which men should be men and women should be women. Psychoanalysis was born out of Freud_s fascination with the hysterical symptoms that women were exhibiting at the turn of the century. He stated that there was no such thing as pure masculinity or femininity. But in the years that followed, Freud fled this psyche/soma, objectivity/subjectivity uncertainty and used gender to cap the fragmented, splintered word of knowing he had found and created a __highly differentiated,__ centered, integrated mechanistic self that was __distinctly male.__ By the 1950s, psychoanalysts had embroidered this stance into detailed, binary, rigid, inflexible, pseudo-scientific, and contradictory stereotypes of men and women. At first, feminists responded with parallel stereotypes, but by the late 1970s, they began to question the whole inflexibly dualistic set-up and to question whether anyone can successfully be __masculine__ or __feminine.__ Contemporary analysts have set about deconstructing the gendered, binary, biological language of psychoanalysis: with passive and active standing for male and female, and heterosexuality and homosexuality standing for gender health vs. gender pathology. Analysts find themselves questioning all of the old psychoanalytic assumptions about gender and identity. The paper presents case material from the treatment of two men who struggled with binary, gendered issues.