ABSTRACT
The ideas of `male' and `female' and `masculine' and `feminine' point both to biological entities and to socially constructed discourses ± we inhabit a powerfully gendered society in which it is dif®cult to separate the person from the social and contextual and where the sexualization of the self and other plays a dominant role (Foucault, 1981). This domain is also dif®cult to tackle without including questions of power (O'Reilly Byrne and Colgan McCarthy, 1999). A number of writers in the therapeutic ®eld point to the importance of not taking a binary view of sexuality, and in doing so challenge what are often viewed as somewhat oversimpli®ed ideas originated by Freud in his notion of the Oedipus complex (e.g. Benjamin, 1995). We also live in an era where there is increasing awareness of power dynamics and oppression leading to professional guidelines which are based in a recognition of the ways in which oppression can be enacted in the therapy room with clients (e.g. American Psychological Association, 2000). It is also worth re¯ecting on the socially constructed nature of `dysfunction' in the context of the medical model and the fact that `ego-dystonic homosexuality' was taken off the American Psychological Association's list of mental illnesses only in 1973 (Wilson, 1993). All of these factors present a signi®cant challenge to the psychotherapist, although in our view an integrative frame of reference takes as its task the challenge of holding such different perspectives and managing the tension between them.
