We like to believe we’ve moved beyond misogyny. But misogyny isn’t just about hostility or bias. It is a set of entrenchedunconscious instructions about gendered structures—shaping identity, relationships, and even therapy itself.

And crucially, this isn’t theoretical. Nor is it limited to feminist, relational, or psychoanalytic practice. If you are in the room with a client, you are in the presence of gendered expectations. No therapeutic modality sits outside this.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Philosopher Kate Manne (2020) defines misogyny as the “law enforcement arm” of patriarchy—not a belief system, but a mechanism of control. It rewards compliance. It punishes defiance. It governs through expectation, omission, and self-surveillance.

In therapeutic work, this can show up in surprisingly subtle yet potent ways:

• A client who believes her needs are “too much”
• A therapist whose interpretations are dismissed by a male client—but validated by her female supervisor
• A woman who repeatedly chooses relationships where she is undervalued, convinced that she must compress herself to make relationships work
• A male client who resists therapy altogether, convinced that it’s “just talking about feelings”
• A female therapist whose experience of being undermined is reframed by her male supervisor as maternal transference—erasing the societal context
• A therapist who wonders whether her male clients feel able to acknowledge menstruation or menopause at all—and what it means when they don’t.
• A supervisor who favours theory over feeling, quietly reinforcing the idea that emotional expression is excessive or indulgent

Bringing Gendered Structures to Life

These gendered structures don’t just live in the mind. They take shape in the body, in gestures, in what gets said—and what doesn’t. A teacher who always lets others speak first. A grandmother who apologises before expressing frustration. A male friend who changes the subject when emotions get too close. A father who withdraws the moment his vulnerability is seen—or who berates himself for feeling it at all. A child who learns, early, that softness is unsafe. And the therapist who finds herself instinctively softening her words to avoid sounding “too much”.

These aren’t quirks or communication styles. They’re internalised gendered strategies—scripts absorbed through attachment, culture, and repetition, often long before speech. And they don’t stop at the therapy door. They enter the room with our clients. And with us.

Recognising this doesn’t just deepen our insight—it protects the integrity of the work. Ignoring it doesn’t make it disappear; it only makes it harder to name, metabolise, and transform.

Drawing from psychoanalytic, object relations, and feminist-informed frameworks, they will examine:

• The Phantasy Body & Internal Models of Misogyny: How early identifications form unconscious gendered templates that shape personality, relational patterns, and symptom formation.
• The Logic of Misogyny in Clinical Work: Why gendered structures are so deeply entrenched in the psyche, why they persist even when a client consciously rejects them, and how they manifest in everyday clinical work.
• Therapeutic Challenges & Interventions: How to recognise misogyny in clinical work without triggering client resistance; how therapists may inadvertently collude with gendered scripts; and how to help clients begin to break free.
• Countertransference & the Therapist’s Role: How internalised misogyny affects clinicians themselves, what happens when it appears in transference, and how to navigate authority, bias, and power dynamics in the therapeutic space.

What To Expect

In this intellectually rigorous and clinically grounded seminar, psychoanalytic clinicians Dr Jan McGregor Hepburn and Michaela Chamberlain will unpack how unconscious gendered structures show up in therapy—in transference, enactments, silences, and therapeutic blind spots.

This seminar combines theoretical depth with practical application through interactive elements including small group discussions, guided reflective exercises, and collaborative case formulation. Participants will actively engage with the material, not just intellectually but experientially. This seminar is not about ideology; it is about the material conditions of relational life—and what gets misrecognised or missed in therapy when misogyny remains unnamed. Practical Techniques You’ll Learn:

• Language frameworks for addressing gendered patterns without evoking defensiveness
• Somatic markers that signal when gendered dynamics are activated in session
• Supervision questions that uncover unconscious gendered collusion
• Therapeutic interventions suitable for brief therapy, CBT, and integrative approaches
• Strategies for working with resistant or defensive responses

Together, Jan and Michaela bring a powerful lens to how misogyny is not an external issue—it is internalised, embodied, and enacted. Including by us.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the seminar, participants will be able to:

✅ Describe how misogyny functions at unconscious and systemic levels, shaping self-perception and relational patterns (Manne, 2020).
✅ Identify internalised misogynistic structures in client narratives, therapeutic relationships, and supervision dynamics.
✅ Analyse how gendered expectations embed in internal working models, and why they persist even when consciously rejected.
✅ Recognise the impact of misogyny in transference, countertransference, and clinical decision-making.
✅ Apply psychoanalytic and feminist-informed interventions to work with unconscious gendered biases.
✅ Develop strategies to explore gendered themes in therapy without reinforcing shame or retreat.

Who Should Attend

This seminar is for psychotherapists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, and mental health professionals who want to:
✔ Deepen their understanding of gendered unconscious structures
✔ Explore how misogyny may shape therapeutic narratives, impasses, and relational dynamics
✔ Learn to work more effectively—and more consciously—with gender in the clinical space

Whether you work psychodynamically, behaviourally, systemically or integratively—you are working with gendered structures. This seminar will help you make the invisible visible, and clinically usable.

Reserve Your Place

Spaces are limited for this vital opportunity to explore how deeply internalised gendered structures shape therapy from the inside out.

Book now to explore what you may already be noticing—but haven’t yet named.

© nscience 2025 / 26