This special section of Psychoanalytic Perspectives presents four papers on themes relating to transgender, a subject that is front of mind in both the cultural/political landscape as well as in the psychoanalytic arena.
We publish this special section as a way to support both analysts and patients, and also to confront the backlash of our cultural moment. Goldner (Citation2011) writes that we cannot say that gender crossing is “never a symptom of, or a defense against, psychic distress or trauma” (p. 167); but these essays highlight the analyst’s, the profession’s, and indeed our culture’s anxiety as much as our patients’, with an emphasis not on etiology but on the reduction of suffering. In different ways, they argue for the continual need to examine, expand, challenge, and rethink our notions of gender and gender identity, and to safeguard our patients’ ability to formulate and understand their own subjective sense of self.
There is already a substantial body of psychoanalytic literature on transgender written over the last 20 years (for a comprehensive suggested reading list, see Saketopoulou, Citation2022). The work presented here extends, challenges, and elaborates that scholarship, with contributions by Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot, Sandra Silverman, Hilary Offman, and Patricia Gherovici. These writers are in dialogue, both implicitly and explicitly, with other analysts invested in developing our awareness and criticality. They draw our attention to the multifaceted issues raised by transgender and show how nonconforming or non-normative gender expression challenges our fundamental theories and assumptions about gender and identity, leading to new ways of conceptualizing our work with gender-diverse and trans patients. They keep our focus on the importance of the relationship between the analyst and the analysand in the clinical encounter, with an emphasis on the analyst’s countertransference, while reminding us that psychoanalysis is situated in a particular historical and cultural context that both represents and informs our thinking and our work.
Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot discusses the phenomena of transgender in Freudian terms, advocating a position that avoids collapsing it into pathologizing categorizations. Her reading of Freud’s texts explores their core assumptions to highlight their diversion from the normative context in which they were formulated. Yadlin-Gadot illustrates her ideas with a detailed clinical case, arguing that the suffering associated with trans phenomena cannot be explained or treated simply by addressing a sense of gender dysphoria, but must also involve exploring a patient’s destructiveness and aggression as they are imbricated with gender.
Sandra Silverman and Hilary Offman candidly detail their clinical work as cisgendered analysts with non-binary, gender-expansive and trans patients over time. Their extremely thoughtful work illustrates the benefits of rigorous examination of the analyst’s countertransference in helping our patients. Silverman, in three clinical vignettes, illustrates how her attitudes and approach to her gender-questioning patients shifted as she became more comfortable working with gender-expansiveness, while Offman describes how her relational-constructivist approach to psychoanalytic work helped her to be “expert-enough” for her trans patients, despite her lack of specific training in gender or queer theory.
Patricia Gherovici, responding directly and creatively to trans activist Paul Preciado’s remarks to a large European audience of analysts, explicitly focuses on the political, arguing that “psychoanalysis needs to undergo a mutation whose first sign might well be a sex-change.” She suggests that analysands with non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality, rather than threatening the gender status quo, can help us to reorient analytic practice and update its theoretical foundations. Like Yadlin-Gadot, she highlights the potentially radical nature of psychoanalysis; drawing on Kafka and Lacan, among others, she, too, advocates a return to “Pink Freud” in her call for the need for greater openness to the destabilizing forces of transgender in the profession.
Clinical practice and theory are constantly evolving with regard to gender questioning, gender expansiveness, non-binary, and trans issues, and we are grateful to these authors for offering us their current perspectives and for sparking our own thinking about this timely issue.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Rachel Altstein, JD, LP, co-Editor in chief of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, for her work on this special section.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Karen Perlman
Karen Perlman, PhD, LP, is a psychoanalyst in private practice, working with children, adolescents, adults, and families. She is a faculty member and supervisor at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), and is co-editor in chief of Psychoanalytic Perspectives.
References
- Goldner, V. (2011). Trans: Gender in free fall. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 21(2), 159–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481885.2011.562836
- Saketopoulou, A. (2022). On trying to pass off Transphobia as psychoanalysis and cruelty as “clinical logic”: Gender Dysphoria: A therapeutic model for working with children, adolescents and young adults. By Susan Evans and Marcus Evans. London: Phoenix Publishing House, 2021. 272 pp. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91(1), 177–190. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332828.2022.2056378