“If You Knew Who I Really Am …”

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the work of a White lesbian analyst with her White gay male patient who carries a secret feminine self of which he is mortifyingly ashamed. Together they discover this feminine self as the site of childhood gender trauma—for years the patient was violently and persistently bullied for not being a masculine-enough boy. To enable this patient to address his shame and find an internal space to develop an authentic gender identity, analyst and patient must take account of and process the field of the treatment room as it exists within the larger social/political field of Trump’s America, in which the forces of misogyny, homophobia, gender rigidity, and racism combine to collapse any breathable space for this dyad’s multiple “deviant” identities.

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Notes on contributors

Deborah Sherman

Deborah Sherman, BC-DMT, LMHC, lives and works in New York City, where she has a private practice in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. She is on faculty and supervises at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity (IPSS) and the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy (ICP) and leads a supervision group at the Psychotherapy Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (PCGS) at ICP. Deborah is also on faculty at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP) and directs the One Year Intensive Psychotherapy Program at IPSS.