Gender Transition Between Life and Death

ABSTRACT

Starting from the case vignette of Jude, a young teenager who claimed to be “oppressed by gender” after making a spectacular suicidal gesture, I want to explore what can lead from death to life, which would make us consider death more as a life force, a force that allows for a re-birth. Clinical work opens a path towards figuring out how to live with the death drive, which, paradoxically renders life possible. Here death emerges not as the opposite of life but rather as a condition for life. This essay takes inspiration on a clinical meditation about the suicidal tendencies of analysands lost in “gender disorders” who “find themselves” in a trans identity. Reference will be made to Freud’s case of the young homosexual woman and to my work on trans identity as an “act.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the author(s).

Notes

^1. Freud (1920) notes a remarkable element in the lady’s rejection: The fact that at that moment the “Lady” had spoken in just the same terms as her father, and had uttered the same prohibition, forms the connecting link between this deep interpretation and the superficial one of which the girl herself was conscious.

^2. A few paragraphs further, Freud offered this antiessentialist insight: “The literature of homosexuality usually fails to distinguish clearly enough between questions of choice of object on the one hand, and of sexual characteristics and sexual attitude on the other, as though the answer to the former necessarily involved the answers to the latter” (p. 170).

^3. Lacan J., Le Séminaire, livre XIV, « La logique du fantasme »…. L’objet cause du désir est la béance autour de quoi tourne la pulsion. Le désir en fait le tour parce qu’il est agi dans la pulsion qui supporte la dimension sexuelle forclose. »

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Patricia Gherovici

Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D, is a psychoanalyst, analytic supervisor, and recipient of the 2020 Sigourney Award. She is co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group and Associate Faculty, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania (PSYS) and co-founder and trustee Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, New York. Her single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Gradiva Award and Boyer Prize, Other Press: 2003), Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge: 2010) and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge: 2017). She edited two volumes with Manya Steinkoler: Lacan On Madness: Madness Yes You Can’t (Routledge: 2015) and Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (Cambridge University Press: 2016). Most recently, she published with Chris Christian Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious (Gradiva Award for best edited collection and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize; Routledge: 2019.) Her collection (with Manya Steinkoler) Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans* won the Gradiva Award for Best Edited Collection (Routledge, 2023.)