Revival of the Fundamental Anthropological Situation: Supervision, Intromission, Trans*, and the Sexual¹

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on conflicts stemming from the vertical and hierarchically ridden transmission of psychoanalysis through the supervision process. Drawing on a Laplanchian framework, the author argues that the intromission of violent signifiers emanating from the supervisor is liable to alter the supervisee’s idiosyncratic functions and attack their thinking activity. To illustrate this argument, the author recounts his own supervised treatment of a transgender adolescent during which the supervisor–supervisee transference lapsed into a sadomasochistic relationship and a folie-à-deux, leading to the premature termination of both the therapy and the supervision. An initial interpretation of this experience explores the theoretical bias associated with transgender subjectivities, which blinded the supervisor and made him irrationally aggressive. A second post hoc reading of this case reveals the therapist’s own blind spot: his overidentification with the patient and his ensuing need to protect the latter from pathologization. Accordingly, the failed supervision may be viewed as an attack on the third-party function linked to the patient’s psychic organization. Finally, the countertransference madness to which the therapist succumbed with his supervisor can be understood as the unbinding of repressed infantile sexuality and the reenactment of paradoxical messages intromitted to the patient’s body ego by his parents.

KEYWORDS:

• Laplanche
• fundamental anthropological situation
• supervision
• transgender
• implantation/intromission
• infantile sexuality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ This article is a shortened but extensively revised version of a paper originally published in the special issue of The Psychoanalytic Review, “Trans* Becomings and Countertransference. Volume I: A Contemporary Perspective from France,” edited by Nicolas Evzonas. The reference for the published paper is the following: Evzonas, N. (2021). “Countertransference Madness: Supervision, Trans*, and the Sexual.” The Psychoanalytic Review 108(4):475–510. The theoretical background of the original paper is the “confusion of tongues” paradigm, while a Laplanchian framework is used in the current version. The clinical material is reworked and reproduced in Studies in Gender and Sexuality with the permission of Guilford Press.

² One of the rare exceptions that I have found in the literature is the article by Choder-Goldman (2015), which describes the “confusion of tongues” between a psychoanalytic candidate and her training analyst regarding a homosexual analysand.

³ The translations of Laplanche’s citations are my own.

⁴ Following Glocer Fiorini’s (2017) arguments, I use the expression “third-party function” instead of the traditional psychoanalytic term “paternal function” (or what Lacan called the “name-of-the-father”) to describe the child’s separation from the primary caregiver. The assumption that the primary object is invariably the mother and that the separation agency refers solely to the father overlooks the emergence of new family configurations that do not abide by the mother–child–father triangle. Let us not forget that fathers nowadays may also have a caregiving role and mothers a third-party function.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicolas Evzonas

Nicolas Evzonas (Ph.D. in literature and Ph.D. in psychopathology and psychoanalysis) is a Greek Cypriot Paris-based psychoanalytic therapist in private practice. He is a candidate in the French Psychoanalytic Association (APF, International Psychoanalytical Association [IPA]) and an assistant professor in clinical psychology at the University of Paris. He has published numerous papers in French, English, Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese on clinical and applied psychoanalysis, as well as essays on films, theater, and literature. He is the author of a forthcoming French book on gender countertransference, the co-editor of a recent issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry on “Sexualities, Gender, Class, and Race: A Psychoanalytic View from France,” and the editor of a double special issue of The Psychoanalytic Review on “Trans* Becomings and Countertransference” with a transepistemological and transcultural scope.