Danger and Discovery, Privilege and Possibility: Response to Goldner and Malamed

ABSTRACT

In response to the paper “Nicki, Nicholas, Nicole: Play as Relational Therapeutic Action on the Transgender Edge,” Virginia Goldner and Charla Malamed have offered supportive comments and important critiques. Goldner has raised questions about the process of mourning gendered self-states that present themselves earlier in development. This paper, as a response to the respondents, puts Goldner’s questions in dialogue with the concepts of après coup and psychic time, problematizing notions about what is past and present vis-à-vis varying gender configurations. Malamed links my lack of explicit disclosure around certain positionalities to creating a space that was dangerous for therapeutic play. Here, I take issue with the concreteness of that position, suggesting that the intersubjective fabric of a treatment—and subsequent democratization of the clinical relationship—is a more appropriate benchmark for evaluating the potential for exploitative dynamics. The nature of risk and safety in clinical encounters is also discussed.

This article responds to:

A Safe Space to Play Dangerously: Contextualizing Gender Play in Therapy

What’s in a Name?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ According to Mitchell, the term “Cis Gaze” is first known to have emerged in the discourse through a Tweet on March 22^nd, 2014, by transgender photographer Sophia Banks. I cite Mitchell here for her writing on the topic.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sam Guzzardi

Sam Guzzardi, L.C.S.W., is a psychoanalyst trained at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity (IPSS) in New York City. Prior to his analytic training, Sam studied at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and at the Yale Child Study Center. He maintains a practice in New York where he focuses on issues of gender, sexuality, identity, trauma and grief. Sam is the winner of the 2019 Ralph Roughton Award of the American Psychoanalytic Association for his paper “The Only Fag Around: Twinship in Gay Childhood.” He is currently a member of the teaching faculty at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP) in New York.