Abstract
In this article, I consider some of the dilemmas and challenges of a male therapist working with female adolescents, in counterpoint to those facing the father of adolescent daughters. There is a conventional wisdom that female adolescents need female therapists; I argue that this kind of thinking is related to the common phenomenon of fathers withdrawing emotionally from their daughters when they reach adolescence. I draw out some implications of what it might mean to father an adolescent daughter if one does not accept the conventional wisdom.
Notes
1Perhaps we are working our adolescents into the ground academically to try to keep them away from high-school sex.
2Note how I am using the words man and woman to refer alternately to a fact and a feeling about oneself.