THE DAWN OF A NEW IDENTITY: ASPECTS OF A RELATIONAL APPROACH TO PSYCHOTHERAPY WITH A TRANSSEXUAL CLIENT

The importance of developing a certain consciousness in which one is present and autonomous while being intimately interconnected with larger meaning is an important dimension of a relational approach to psychotherapy. Based on the premise that both client and therapist bring something of themselves and of their respective past emotional experience to the therapeutic relationship, a relational approach to therapy is very attentive to the dynamics in the therapy room. It stresses the co-creation of the therapeutic relationship at conscious, explicit verbal levels and unconscious, implicit levels of functioning, and establishes the therapist's emotional behaviour as a significant factor in fostering change (Aron, 1996). Therapist responsiveness to client's affective impact is discussed with emphasis on its centrality to clinical practice and its relationship to countertransference. A case study of the psychotherapeutic journey with ‘Dawn’ (previously ‘David’), a 53 year-old client who was awaiting sex-reassignment surgery, is presented which illustrates how the therapist's struggle in the countertransference represents part of a complex relational body/mind system of parallel processes, re-enactment and potential for therapeutic change.