ABSTRACT
The assumption that, among psychologically healthy individuals, gender is established once and for all as masculine or feminine in early life no longer seems tenable in light of recent investigations that have boldly challenged traditional psychoanalytic perspectives (Person and Ovesey, 1983; Benjamin, 1988; Butler, 1989; Dimen, 1991; Goldner, 1991; Harris, 1991; Burch, 1993; Aron, 1995; Crawford, 1996). Moreover, as several of these writers suggest, viewing gender as if it were a naturally occurring binary system perpetuates a pathogenic situation. For Crawford (1996) the ascription of radically dichotomized qualities to males and females leads to nothing less than the traumatic severing of self-experience.
