Master Series in Clinical Practice

The Master Series affords the chance to spend a complete day with leaders in our field to consider the unique perspective each speaker brings to the challenging dilemmas in both theory and practice. We hope that you will consider joining us for the entire series at a reduced tuition or choose the programs most relevant to your own practice.

Nancy J. Chodorow, PhD, instructor

Working with gender and sexuality poses a particular challenge for the clinician, because none of us learns of these after we begin our training.  Rather, we enter the sex-gender world at birth and even before, labeled and soon self-labeled in a personal-familial world of emotionally-charged, unconscious, conscious and cultural-political meanings.  Our transferences and countertransferences to sexuality and gender are formed early, held deeply and intertwined with our core of self and identity. Dr. Nancy J. Chodorow has spent much of her career writing and thinking about sexuality and gender.  Her foundational The Reproduction of Mothering rethought female development and described the developmental and psychological importance of the mother-daughter relationship.  In recent years, she considered how this same mother-daughter relationship enters into adult women’s conflicts and decisions about having or not having children. "Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation" argued that clinicians needed to make the heterosexualities and their treatment as problematic and in need of engagement as the homosexualities. Later, “Homosexualities as Compromise Formations” advocated a more individualized and fine-tuned understanding on the clinician’s part of what goes into anyone’s sexual identity and practices, including that of the clinician. Her recent Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice investigates the many factors that compose each person’s sense of masculine or feminine self, their feelings and conflicts about their sexuality and gender and the ways we can work with these to help our patients. This program will enable participants to learn more about the many and varied components that go into each person’s, each patient’s, sexuality and gender and to consider how the clinician’s own sex and gender, formed from birth onwards, enter the consulting room and affect how we listen to and how we can help patients. Participants will also consider the impact of culture, cultural variation and cultural change on gender and sexual identities and practices and explore how gender and sexuality become enmeshed in transference and countertransference.

Upon completion of the program, the student will be able to:

• Explore countertransference and the expectations about sexuality and gender that they bring to their clinical work
• Examine the psychologies of sexuality and gender in helping patients
• Describe how to help patients to think about their own gender and sexuality in terms of each patient’s unique individuality
• Discuss how psychoanalytic thinking about sexuality and gender has changed over the years, so that participants and their patients are less constrained by old understandings and prejudices

Program Code: MS57
6 CE/CME Credits
Location: at MSPP, Newton

Nancy J. Chodorow, Ph.D., is Training and Supervising Analyst, Boston Psycho­analytic Institute; Geographic Rule Super­vising Analyst, Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Institute, Faculty, San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, Lecturer on Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; and Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of Cali­fornia, Berkeley. Her books include Indi­vidualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice, The Power of Feelings: Per­sonal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture, Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory and The Reproduction of Mothering. She is author of numerous articles on comparative theory and technique, Loewald and the Loewaldian tradition, sexuality, women, men and gender. She has won numerous awards and fellowships.

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