Cross-sex supervision for cross-sex therapy

Abstract

The female supervisor can help the male therapist in training to overcome problems in cross-sex therapy by presenting herself as a role model, providing relevant literature, and sharing her own experiences as a woman and as a professional. By enabling the male trainee to identify safely with a woman in a position of relative power, she can help him to deal with the intrinsic limitations of empathy and with other problems, such as "countertransference deafness," that may block his work with female patients.