Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers a number of contemporary perspectives with regard to the gender issue. It explains generative potential for psychoanalytic theorizing when the treatment process is contextually explored from a gender perspective. The book discusses the gender of the psychoanalyst as an issue of central importance for the treatment of homosexual patients. It describes conceptions in light of contemporary object relations theoretical formulations, which provide a meaningful revision of Sigmund Freud’s original “script.” The gender of the patient and of the psychoanalyst is assumed to be extremely important parameters having contextual significance for the clinical data and interpretive conclusions derived from psychoanalytic treatment. The Oedipus complex, which is the very bedrock of psychoanalytic thinking, has recently been explored from a gender perspective with the assumption that there is a differentiated feminine version of that complex.