The monsters within and the monsters without: Gender dissidents and the future of psychoanalysis

Abstract

This paper is a response to writer, philosopher, and trans activist Paul Preciado’s 2019 presentation to 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference in Paris. There, Preciado wittily alluded to Kafka’s 1917 short story, “Report to an Academy.” In the story, an ape named Red Peter, who has learned to behave like a human, presents to an academy the story of how he achieved his transformation into an acceptable, educated European (but he is ready to pull his pants down as needed to show a bullet wound commemorating his capture). Thus, Preciado exhibited himself as a transsexual specimen like Kafka’s ape, who ironically claimed that he was as “human” as anyone in the audience. To push the metaphor further, I will invoke Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis and argue that psychoanalysis needs to undergo a mutation whose first sign might well be a sex change.

Keywords:

• Animal
• dissidence
• gender
• human
• Kafka
• sexuality
• trans
• transsexuality

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

¹ Here I am alluding to an overdue transformation in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Analysands with non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality can reorient the analytic practice and update its theoretical foundations. For a further development, see 2011“Psychoanalysis Needs a Sex Change” Gherovici (2011).

² The story was first published by Martin Buber in the German monthly journal Der Jude, and Red Peter’s plight can be interpreted as an allegory of the Jewish experience of religious assimilation and introjection of antisemitism.

³ I am turning here to what Stryker (2004) calls the “evil twin” of queer theory: the trans discourse. Both trans embodiments and homosexuality show us non-normative ways of dealing with the imperative to assume a sexual positioning and to choose an object. Some distinctions between queer and trans discourses are necessary. The concept of “queerness” has been associated mainly with homosexuality. The feeling that there is a disagreement between the being that inhabits the body and the sex that has been assigned is an experience that highlights that one is not a body but rather one “has” a (sexed) body that must be assumed in some way.

⁴ As Parker (2007) observes, what we call gender is “a signifier that operates as an imaginary effect of a real difference.” The “imaginary effect” that we call gender.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patricia Gherovici

Patricia Gherovici, PhD is a recipient of the Sigourney Award. Her single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (2003), Gradiva Award and Boyer Prize; Please Select Your Gender (2010); and Transgender Psychoanalysis (2017). She edited (with Chris Christian) Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious, Gradiva Award and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize; 2019. The collection (with Manya Steinkoler) Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans* was published in November 2022.