ABSTRACT
In much recent psychological literature on gender there has been an understandable concern with the sources of sexual difference and in particular with the origins of men’s coercive and often abusive behaviour towards others – notably children and women. Some of this work derives from a specifically systemic theoretical and therapeutic framework (e.g. Goldner et al. 1990), but much of it has been either atheoretical or eclectic in psychological terms (e.g. Segal 1990) or has had strong psychoanalytic underpinnings (e.g. Benjamin 1988; Jukes 1993). Indeed, even within some of the systemic literature, as in the Goldner et al. paper referenced above, there is recourse to psychoanalytic thinking to fill in the details of the internal ‘mental state’ or heritage of the individual protagonists in the gender-rigid or violence-saturated system.
