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(2002). Psychoanalytic Psychology, 19:455-474

The Imposition of Gender: Psychoanalytic Encounters with Genital Atypicality

Nina Williams, PsyD

The experience of intersexed people has been explored in only a handful of psychoanalytic reports, none of which examine the effects of the medical treatment that is central to their early history. This article presents the case of a woman who feared she was intersexed. The dynamics, transference, and countertransference configurations reenact the empathic failure implicit in her medical treatment and her family life, namely a caretaker's preoccupation with the patient's unusual anatomy, rather than her trauma.

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