Freud: The First Queer Theorist?

Abstract

In this article I discuss the phenomena of transgender in Freudian terms and advocate a position that avoids collapsing it into diagnostic categorizations. My reading of the relevant Freudian texts construes their core assumptions in a way that highlights their diversion from the normative context in which they were formulated. I illustrate my reading by presenting a detailed clinical case, focusing on the tensions between the inherent heterogeneity of Freudian sexuality and the personal and social demand for homogeneity and coherence. Using Freud’s late formulations of psychic conflict, I argue that the suffering associated with trans phenomena cannot be explained or treated by addressing only the misalignment between gender and anatomy. Both must grapple with the intense presence of the death drive, with its derivative destructiveness and aggression, in the arena of gender.

Keywords:

• anatomy
• bisexuality
• death drive
• dimensions of sexual identity
• mental attributes
• object choice
• psychosexual stages

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

¹ In his Three Essays (1905) Freud gave examples of homosexuality as present “in people who exhibit no other serious deviations from the normal;”1905, p. 137), in “people whose efficiency is unimpaired, and who are indeed distinguished by specially high intellectual development and ethical culture;” (1905, p. 138) as “an institution charged with important functions—among the peoples of antiquity at the height of their civilization.”(1905) and, finally, as “remarkably widespread among many savage and primitive races, whereas the concept of degeneracy is usually restricted to states of high civilization.”(1905).

² He never found it to be an antisocial character flaw, and signed a petition to decriminalize homosexuality in 1930s Germany and Austria.

³ “ … we should not hesitate to include this regression from object-cathexis to the still narcissistic oral phase of the libido in our characterization of melancholia” (Freud, 1917, p. 249).

⁴ De Beauvoir repeatedly emphasized that men and woman alike, are trapped in a fetishistic conception of gender, arbitrarily subjugating psychological identity to the attributes of the anatomic male genital. Placing the vagina as equivalent to the penis, as marker of femininity, might have allowed woman a definition unrelated to the penis, but would have subjugated her, indeed both sexes, to an additional fetish. We would have then had a society subjugated to two fetishes—masculine and feminine, with both sexes\genders required to align their psyche arbitrarily with the characteristics of prescribed anatomical “markers.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot

Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and teacher in the Tel Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TAICP). She teaches and supervises in the Multidisciplinary track of the Humanities Faculty and in the Freudian, Doctoral and Psychotherapy tracks in the School of Psychotherapy, Sackler school of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University. She is board member and co-chair of the international colloquium committee in the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. She writes and lectures on Freud, Lacan and truth, integrating perspectives of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and cultural studies. Her book Truth Matters: Theory and Practice in Psychoanalysis, was published by Brill in 2016. She lives and practices in Ramat-Hasharon, Israel.