ABSTRACT

This chapter examines a particular aspect of the interactive constitution of identity within the psychoanalytic therapeutic situation, namely, the constraint of culturally idealized gender polarizations on the discursive instantiation of the selves of therapist and patient. Identity, a consolidated conceptualization of the sense of self or subjectivity, has emerged as a focus of theoretical debate across scholarly disciplines including psychoanalysis. Recognition of the focal role played by language and communication in the constitution of human institutions and experience has made apparent the social situatedness of the experience of a sense of personal identity. This aspect of experience is, then, socially mediated, constituted in interpersonal interaction. The relevance of psychoanalytic theories to the patient's experience of self in the therapeutic encounter is mediated through the patient's understandings of the therapist's theories; understandings which are themselves mediated by "popular" and native theories of therapy and psychological health.