As psychoanalytic psychotherapy embraces relational and intersubjective ideas, the person of the clinician comes more into view. Nowhere is this more evident than in the domain of self-disclosure. This article addresses the clinical complexity surrounding personal disclosure when issues of the therapist's sexual orientation and major loss and the processing of grief enter the therapeutic field.KEYWORDS self-disclosure, sexual orientation, grief and loss, relational/intersubjective frameworks PROLOGUE Psychoanalytic method and technique, in theory, offer safeguards against hegemony in the field. But is this true in practice and in our psychoanalytic community? Are we as open-minded about gender, race, and sexual orientation as we profess or do our biases blind us? When I brought an early draft of this article to a psychoanalytic writing group that I belonged to, my heterosexual colleagues were baffled by the idea that disclosing the death of my same-sex partner in a treatment setting would be different from any other personal material revealed by a therapist. For them, it was just another item to be analyzed. Although in principle I didn't disagree, this response struck me as naive at best. As a lesbian clinician, I struggled with the issue of self-disclosure in the therapeutic setting when my life partner died. This article is offered as a counterpoint to those who believe that differences in our sexual orientation are of little consequence.
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