ABSTRACT
It is often questioned whether the gender of the therapist is important to the course of therapy. This chapter contends that gender does have an impact and that the male parent-infant psychotherapist therapist has an emblematic role in preserving or modelling the experience of the parental couple and co-parenting relationship when it is at risk. The author considers the parent/s response to the male therapist – whether he is felt as a threat, a father or partner presence, or as an alternate paternal male figure who can offer a transformative relationship through a temporary experience of care. This will depend also on how multiple transferential relationships touch upon the therapist’s own internal world and unconscious wishes from the therapeutic encounter. Clinical accounts are presented from work with a young couple and their baby and a single mother and her baby where transference and phantasy reflected the states of coupledom and aloneness. Similarly, the work with the babies held different symbolic meaning in the two cases.
