| Abstrakt: |
The article focuses on therapist and changing sex roles. The actual and the prospective changes in women's sex roles and self-images have their reverberations throughout the whole network of sexual roles and identities, and inexorably compel alteration in complementary fashion in the male sex roles and self-images, and in turn are reciprocally influenced by them. A therapist needs to maintain a level of self-awareness, even though to do so stirs a degree of tension within him: otherwise he defensively slips into the more comfortable but reductionist state of mind where one or the other partial perception substitutes for the whole. A therapist who avoids his own ambivalence may proudly affirm in a client family the wife's need for liberation, but since that therapist has blocked out of sight and awareness his residual stereotype of sex roles, and is denying his own duality of introjects, he cannot recognize this woman's anxiety about change and her subtle clinging to an older, accustomed dependent role. His intended supportiveness of the woman becomes in its effect self-serving and is felt as pressure, not support, by the client. |
