gender guiding lines

Dreikurs made use of Adler's concept of guiding lines to explore a person's ideas about masculine and feminine and what it means to the individual to be a man or woman.   He formalized this investigation in the life-style assessment process.  To uncover what he called the masculine and feminine guiding lines, Dreikurs asked the client to tell him about father and mother in the childhood years, up to about ages nine or ten, posing the questions, "What kind of a man was father?" and "What kind of a woman was mother?"  By means of these questions he learned what there was about the parents which impressed the client.  From this material, Dreikurs wrote a summary statement of the client's un-examined attitudes about what was required of him or of her to be a man or a woman.