Beyond milk and the good breast reconfiguring the maternal function in psychoanalytic dyads

Abstract

This paper addresses the gender of the analyst as an important factor in the shaping of the analytic experience. Specifically, it focuses on the notion that female analysts bring something different from what male analysts bring to the analytic dyad and that this influences and shapes the analysts’ translation of the patients’ experience—determining treatment course and therapeutic enactments. It begins with the idea that, for some men, working with a female analyst may ease the processing and metabolization of their aggression—allowing for a (re) integration of it with their sexuality and desire. The clinical material of a male analysand who sought treatment from a woman analyst is used to explore this idea within a post‐Lacanian framework incorporating Kristeva's work on the maternal chora, the imaginary father or third, and the journey that the infant must make from the real to the symbolic, from biology to desire.