As our present culture struggles (as all cultures do) to find what seem like the “truths” about ourselves and our position in the culture, we must all relate personally to the emerging ideas that have enormous impact in generating pivotal assumptions of physical and psychology identity. Issues such as recognizing the urgent need to bring in those who have been outcasts, or our yearning for an understanding of the variance of sexualities and gender, are some of the conditions that generate a tendency to coagulate a readily communicable identity, offering a sense of knowing who one is and who is the other. The analytic relationship becomes an arena where these truths and emerging ideas are tested in terms of an individual’s own psychology. The ways in which we approach these current themes, how they emerge in the work, and how we maintain a psychological attitude in the presence of these tensions will be the focus of our discussion. For clinicians only.
- Describe how identity politics can intersect with the therapist’s analytic perspective towards a patient’s exploration of their gender identity and sexuality.
- Give an example of how a “political identity” can interfere with a patient’s exploration of the individual self and its uniqueness.
