Thinking psychoanalytically, thinking better: Reflections on transgender

Journal title PSICOTERAPIA E SCIENZE UMANE
Author/s Avgi Saketopoulou
Publishing Year 2021 Issue 2021/1 Language Italian
Pages 16 P. 61-76 File size 341 KB
DOI 10.3280/PU2021-001007
DOI is like a bar code for intellectual property: to have more infomation click here

Below, you can see the article first page

If you want to buy this article in PDF format, you can do it, following the instructions to buy download credits

Article preview

FrancoAngeli is member of Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA), a not-for-profit association which run the CrossRef service enabling links to and from online scholarly content.

This article dispels the myth that gender is a non-psychoanalytic concept imposed on psychoanalysts by other disciplines (e.g., sociology) and/or activists, and argues for de-dramatizing the discourse around transgender so that we may work and think collectively about complex genders and their varied embodiments. Such thinking would involve identifying why the category of trans embodiment has produced such a crisis in our field – to look, that is, internally rather than externally for the sources of this crisis. It is proposed that this crisis has, in part, arisen because transgender has confronted analysts with the limitations of our established theories about the body, the category of action, and, in some schools of analytic thinking, about the enduring primacy of phylogenetic fantasy. Psychoanalysts are urged to engage this crisis productively by re-thinking, that is, by thinking better, this topic.

Keywords: Transgender; Rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD); Transphobia; Transphobic countertransference; Queer psychoanalysis

  1. Aulagnier P. (1975). The Violence of Interpretation: From Pictogram to Statement. London: Routledge (trad. it.: La violenza dell’interpretazione: dal pittogramma all’enunciato. Roma: Borla, 1994).
  2. Berlant L. & Edelman L. (2014). Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  3. Chiland C. (2000). The psychoanalyst and the transsexual patient. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 81, 1: 21-35. DOI: 10.1516/0020757001599483
  4. Corbett K. (1997). Speaking queer: A reply to Richard C. Friedman. Gender and Psychoanalysis, 2, 4: 495-514.
  5. Corbett K. (2009). Boyhood femininity, gender identity disorder, masculine presuppositions, and the anxiety of regulation. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19, 4: 353-370. DOI: 10.1080/10481880903088484
  6. Foucault M. (1970). L’ordre du discours (Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970). Paris: Gallimard, 1971 (trad. it.: L’ordine del discorso. Torino: Einaudi, 1972).
  7. Harris A. (2005). Gender in linear and nonlinear history. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 53, 4: 1079-1095. DOI: 10.1177/000306510505300401
  8. Laplanche J. (1987). Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse. Paris: PUF (trad. it.: Nuovi fondamenti per la psicoanalisi. Roma: Borla, 1989).
  9. Laplanche J. (2003). Le genre, le sexe, le sexual. In: Sexual. La sexualité élargie au sens freudien, 2000-2006. Paris: PUF, 2007, pp. 154-174 (trad. it.: Il genere, il sesso, il sexuale. In: Sexuale: la sessualità allargata nel senso freudiano, 2000-2006. Bari: La Biblioteca, 2007, pp. 147-186; Sesto San Giovanni [MI]: Mimesis, 2019, pp. 147-186; trad. ingl.: Gender, sex, and the sexual. In: Freud and the Sexual. New York: Unconscious in Translation, 2011, pp. 159-202).
  10. Littman L. (2018). Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports. PLoS ONE, 13, 8, e0202330: -- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202330.
  11. Powell D.R. (2018). Race, African Americans, and psychoanalysis: Collective silence in the therapeutic conversation. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 66, 6: 1021-1049. DOI: 10.1177/0003065118818447
  12. Quinodoz D. (1998). A fe/male transsexual patient in psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79, 1: 95-111.
  13. Quinodoz D. (2002). Termination of a fe/male transsexual patient’s analysis: An example of general validity. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 83, 4: 783-798. DOI: 10.1516/7ULG-83LG-PC08-DNTX
  14. Reis B. (2019). Creative Repetition and Intersubjectivity. New York: Routledge.
  15. Scarfone D. (2019). The feminine, the analyst and the child theorist. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 100, 3: 567-575. DOI: 10.1080/00207578.2019.1590781
  16. Scarfone D. (2020). “Trauma, subjectivity and subjectality”. Relazione all’Annual Conference della Western Branch Canadian Psychoanalytic Society (WBCPS), Vancouver, 19-20/3/2020.
  17. Letture consigliate
  18. Butler J. (1993). Melancholy gender – refused identification. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1995, 5, 2: 165-180.
  19. Butler J. (2001). Doing justice to someone: Sex reassignment and allegories of transsexuality. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 7, 4: 621-636. DOI: 10.1215/10642684-7-4-621
  20. Corbett K. (2011). Gender regulation. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 80, 2: 441-459.
  21. Corbett K., Dimen M., Goldner V. & Harris A. (2014). Talking sex, talking gender. A roundtable. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 15, 4: 295-317. DOI: 10.1080/15240657.2014.970493
  22. Dimen M. (1991). Deconstructing difference: Gender, splitting, and transitional space. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1, 3: 335-352. DOI: 10.1080/10481889109538904
  23. Fausto-Sterling A. (2000). Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, capitoli 3, 6 e 7.
  24. Gherovici P. (2019). Transgender expressions and psychosis: Towards an ethics of sexual difference. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 35, 3: 417-430.
  25. Gill-Peterson J. (2018). Histories of the Transgender Child. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
  26. Goldner V. (1991). Toward a critical relational theory of gender. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1, 3: 249-272. DOI: 10.1080/10481889109538898
  27. Goldner V. (2003). Ironic gender/authentic sex. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4, 2: 113-139. DOI: 10.1080/15240650409349219
  28. Gozlan O. (2008). The accident of gender. Psychoanalytic Review, 95, 4: 541-570.
  29. Halberstam J. (2018). Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
  30. Hansbury G. (2017). The masculine Vaginal: Working with queer men’s embodiment at the transgender edge. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 65, 6: 1009-1031.
  31. Harris A. (2000). Gender as a soft assembly. Tomboys’ stories. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 1, 3: 223-250.
  32. Langer S.J. (2016). Trans bodies and the failure of mirrors. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 17, 4: 306-316. DOI: 10.1080/15240657.2016.1236553
  33. Meadow T. (2018). Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
  34. Pellegrini A. & Saketopoulou A. (2019). On taking sides: They/them pronouns, gender and the psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis.Today, www.psychoanalysis.today/en-GB/PT-Articles/Pellegrini167541/On-taking-sides-they-them-pronouns,-gender-and-the.aspx.
  35. Preciado P. (2019). Intervention lors des Journées 49 de l’Ecole de la Cause Freudienne (ECF) “Femmes en psychanalyse”, 17 novembre 2019: https://youtu.be/vqNJbZR_QZ4. Vedi anche: Je suis un monstre qui vous parle: Rapport pour une académie de psychanalystes (2019). Paris: Gallimard, 2020 (https://youtu.be/0iL0yAE4sAE).
  36. Pula J. (2015). Understanding gender through the lens of transgender experience. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 35, 8: 809-822. DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2015.1087289
  37. Rose J. (2016). Who do you think you are? London Review of Books, 38, 9 (May 5, 2016): www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n09/jacqueline-rose/who-do-you-think-you-are.
  38. Saketopoulou A. (2014). Mourning the body as bedrock: Developmental considerations in treating transsexual patients analytically. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 62, 5: 773-806.
  39. Saketopoulou A. (2015). “This compromise formation that is gender: Countertransferential difficulties in work with transgender analyzands”. Relazione al 49° Congresso dell’International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), Boston, 23-26 luglio 2015.
  40. Salamon G. (2014). The dignity of belief. The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis, 1, 1: 113-118.
  41. Snorton R. (2017). Black on Both Sides. A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
  42. Spade D. (2003). Resisting medicine, re/modeling gender. Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, 18: 15-27 (www.deanspade.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/resisting.pdf).
  43. Stryker S. (2020). What does it mean to be a woman? It’s complicated. Time, March 5, 2020: https://time.com/5795626/what-womanhood-means.
  44. Suchet M. (2011). Crossing over. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 21, 2: 172-191. DOI: 10.1080/10481885.2011.562842

Avgi Saketopoulou, Pensare psicoanaliticamente, pensare meglio: riflessioni sul transgender in "PSICOTERAPIA E SCIENZE UMANE" 1/2021, pp 61-76, DOI: 10.3280/PU2021-001007