ABSTRACT
This chapter presents two cases in more detail the way the authors apply the ideas explored in their therapeutic work. It addresses gender in therapy at the levels of the subjective, the relational, and the societal, paying particular attention to the gender premises that individuals hold and that are revealed in their relationships with each other and in their families of origin. The chapter explores the hopes and disappointments of a mother/daughter relationship in the context of a family where men were experienced as absent, violent, or unreliable over three generations. It also explores the experiences of extreme constraint for all family members in a rigidified gendered pattern of a man struggling with a hazardous life-event and preoccupied with maintaining a sense of self on which he could rely and a woman offering support and recognition without asking for it in return.
