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Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference
Drawing on the author's clinical work with gender-variant patients, Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference argues for a depathologizing of the transgender experience, while offering an original analysis of sexual difference. We are living in a "trans" moment that has become the next civil rights frontier. By unfixing our notions of gender, sex, and sexual identity, challenging normativity and essentialisms, trans modalities of embodiment can help reorient psychoanalytic practice.
This book addresses sexual identity and sexuality by articulating new ideas on the complex relationship of the body to the psyche, the precariousness of gender, the instability of the male/female opposition, identity construction, uncertainties about sexual choice--in short, the conundrum of sexual difference. Transgender Psychoanalysis features explications of Lacanian psychoanalysis along with considerations on sex and gender in the form of clinical vignettes from Patricia Gherovici's practice as a psychoanalyst. The book engages with popular culture and psychoanalytic literature (including Jacques Lacan's treatments of two transgender patients), and implements close readings uncovering a new ethics of sexual difference.
These explorations have important implications not just for clinicians in psychoanalysis and mental health practitioners but also for transgender theorists and activists, transgender people, and professionals in the trans field. Transgender Psychoanalysis promises to enrich ongoing discourses on gender, sexuality, and identity.
This book addresses sexual identity and sexuality by articulating new ideas on the complex relationship of the body to the psyche, the precariousness of gender, the instability of the male/female opposition, identity construction, uncertainties about sexual choice--in short, the conundrum of sexual difference. Transgender Psychoanalysis features explications of Lacanian psychoanalysis along with considerations on sex and gender in the form of clinical vignettes from Patricia Gherovici's practice as a psychoanalyst. The book engages with popular culture and psychoanalytic literature (including Jacques Lacan's treatments of two transgender patients), and implements close readings uncovering a new ethics of sexual difference.
These explorations have important implications not just for clinicians in psychoanalysis and mental health practitioners but also for transgender theorists and activists, transgender people, and professionals in the trans field. Transgender Psychoanalysis promises to enrich ongoing discourses on gender, sexuality, and identity.
198 pages, Paperback
Published June 6, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 20, 2018
I think this book has two issues:
1. When it gets to the core of an issue, it explains it refering to a lacanian concept... without explaining it. That was not a problem for me, since I am a lacanian psychoanalyst myself, but to the lay person it will be meaningless. For example, the author explains that we all have to face castration, understood of a lack at the symbolic register... but she doesn't explain it. So the lay person may earn a new word that explains gender issue for cis and trans, but they won't understand any more than they did before.
2. I appreciate that she explains that the gender issue is for everyone, not just for trans ("I should add here that dealing with sexual difference, which also entails but is not limited to assuming one’s sexual and gender preferences, is a problem for everyone.”) However, there is a lack of explanation about how gender is construed in each case. We end up with gender as a sinthome (another concept, a bit more explained, but I would think also cryptic to the lay person), and not much of the reasons behind this claim.
I enjoyed the book since I have the background to understand it, but I think it lays in a middle that lacks power: either you really make it lacanian, and go with all the subtleties and really tackle the sexuation issue in his theory, or make it for a lay person, and explain these issues without relying in unexplained concepts.
1. When it gets to the core of an issue, it explains it refering to a lacanian concept... without explaining it. That was not a problem for me, since I am a lacanian psychoanalyst myself, but to the lay person it will be meaningless. For example, the author explains that we all have to face castration, understood of a lack at the symbolic register... but she doesn't explain it. So the lay person may earn a new word that explains gender issue for cis and trans, but they won't understand any more than they did before.
2. I appreciate that she explains that the gender issue is for everyone, not just for trans ("I should add here that dealing with sexual difference, which also entails but is not limited to assuming one’s sexual and gender preferences, is a problem for everyone.”) However, there is a lack of explanation about how gender is construed in each case. We end up with gender as a sinthome (another concept, a bit more explained, but I would think also cryptic to the lay person), and not much of the reasons behind this claim.
I enjoyed the book since I have the background to understand it, but I think it lays in a middle that lacks power: either you really make it lacanian, and go with all the subtleties and really tackle the sexuation issue in his theory, or make it for a lay person, and explain these issues without relying in unexplained concepts.
December 1, 2019
A bunch of interesting information that loses focus towards the end of the book, but the stuff about "scatology" is probably the best section.... seems to forget what the primary subject of the book is; lots of digressions that are ultimately good.
January 8, 2018
More of a history and a speculation than a "perspective", and for all it name-drops non-binary people, it doesn't particularly consider how they fit into Lacanian sexuation.
September 21, 2019
I read this with two colleagues in a consultation group we have for serving our transgender and gender fluid patients, and we all have an interest in and varying levels of experience with psychoanalytic theory. I wish I had liked this better, and surely part of that relates to the fact that I'm more psychodynamically/attachment-oriented than psychoanalytically inclined (my idiosyncratic definition of that is I typically get more out of Winnicott than Lacan, for example). Sometimes Gherovici's writing seemed intentionally obtuse, but not in a fun, Judith Butler-esque way, and I really wish she had linked her theorizing more explicitly with her clinical work throughout. She has a great write-up of a fascinating course of psychoanalysis at the end, but for me, it came too little, too late.
May 27, 2025
NOTE: This is a pamphlet called Bodies to Wear, initially published by Everyday Analysis. I wanted to write about it, but Goodreads doesn't have the pamphlet listed. Here's a link: https://everyday-analysis.sellfy.stor...
***
According to Patricia Gherovici, psychoanalysis "was born of body trouble" (2). While the psychoanalytic process focuses on non-corporeal phenomena, we do ourselves and psychoanalysis a disservice by emphasizing the psyche at the expense of the body. Ironically, the most emblematic signifier of psychoanalysis, the couch, understands the importance of the body in the analytic process. Gherovici writes, "For Freud, the couch served to position patients in a state of free association, their bodies reclined and their gaze averted" (4). For the patient to engage in free association, the body and the mind require the proper orientation. Contra figures like Judith Butler, the body and all its associations are more than "performances, dynamically interwoven" (11). As Gherovici attests, "as the transgender movement gained visibility...it brought forth a critical counterargument: that the corporeal reality of gender is significant, thereby rejecting the idea that gender is merely a parody" (11). Thanks to recent interventions from figures like Miquel Missé, psychoanalysis is positioned to help redefine "the relationship between self and body" (14). But how we do this, how we "reconcile the body we have with the self are" is of critical concern for Gherovici is this text (13).
What is most revelatory about being trans, as the name implies, is the trans subject's rejection of stasis. Gherovici writes, "To undergo a true transformation, one must navigate this death of the self to emerge anew, reclaiming a body that feels authentic. Thus, gender transition intertwines deeply with themes of mortality, blurring the lines between life and death far more than between male and female" (17). As Gherovici sees it, life (as an isolated concept) is akin to Freud's pleasure principle, a drive toward inactivity (as counterintuitive as it sounds). By contrast, death is the death drive, properly understood as a drive for excitation or, when thinking of questions of sex and gender, iteration and re-birth. Gherovici writes, "If trans analysands experience 'gender trouble,' as Butler puts it, and resolve the 'trouble' finding themselves in a trans identity, I propose a movement from death to life, which would make us consider death more as a life force, a force that allows for a re-birth" (24). Yet, because the death drive is never satisfied, moments of re-birth are less about "'having' but a strategy of 'being'" (24). "Having" sounds teleological, but for Gherovici, being trans means rejecting teleological configurations. Perhaps because we are all, at least for now, embodied subjects, the body and its flailing attempts "to be" is a site of emancipatory politics because we all fail in our "fluctuating" embodied endeavors (25).
What I like so much about this text is how Gherovici frames trans subjectivity as artistic expression. She writes, "It is essential to recognize that choosing to undergo bodily transformation and embracing a gender different from the one assigned at birth can serve as a powerful act of creation—a renaissance, a re-birth that renders life livable" (27). I think this explains why so many conservatives, frankly, hate trans people. Conservatism rejects progress, by definition. Therefore, it makes complete sense that they would direct their anger and hate toward the cohort that represents progress in the most emancipatory way possible. What I also like about this text is its usefulness as a tool for understanding key psychoanalytical concepts. In addition to being relatively short and digestible, Bodies to Wear can be a helpful primer for anyone interested in learning more about psychoanalysis.
***
According to Patricia Gherovici, psychoanalysis "was born of body trouble" (2). While the psychoanalytic process focuses on non-corporeal phenomena, we do ourselves and psychoanalysis a disservice by emphasizing the psyche at the expense of the body. Ironically, the most emblematic signifier of psychoanalysis, the couch, understands the importance of the body in the analytic process. Gherovici writes, "For Freud, the couch served to position patients in a state of free association, their bodies reclined and their gaze averted" (4). For the patient to engage in free association, the body and the mind require the proper orientation. Contra figures like Judith Butler, the body and all its associations are more than "performances, dynamically interwoven" (11). As Gherovici attests, "as the transgender movement gained visibility...it brought forth a critical counterargument: that the corporeal reality of gender is significant, thereby rejecting the idea that gender is merely a parody" (11). Thanks to recent interventions from figures like Miquel Missé, psychoanalysis is positioned to help redefine "the relationship between self and body" (14). But how we do this, how we "reconcile the body we have with the self are" is of critical concern for Gherovici is this text (13).
What is most revelatory about being trans, as the name implies, is the trans subject's rejection of stasis. Gherovici writes, "To undergo a true transformation, one must navigate this death of the self to emerge anew, reclaiming a body that feels authentic. Thus, gender transition intertwines deeply with themes of mortality, blurring the lines between life and death far more than between male and female" (17). As Gherovici sees it, life (as an isolated concept) is akin to Freud's pleasure principle, a drive toward inactivity (as counterintuitive as it sounds). By contrast, death is the death drive, properly understood as a drive for excitation or, when thinking of questions of sex and gender, iteration and re-birth. Gherovici writes, "If trans analysands experience 'gender trouble,' as Butler puts it, and resolve the 'trouble' finding themselves in a trans identity, I propose a movement from death to life, which would make us consider death more as a life force, a force that allows for a re-birth" (24). Yet, because the death drive is never satisfied, moments of re-birth are less about "'having' but a strategy of 'being'" (24). "Having" sounds teleological, but for Gherovici, being trans means rejecting teleological configurations. Perhaps because we are all, at least for now, embodied subjects, the body and its flailing attempts "to be" is a site of emancipatory politics because we all fail in our "fluctuating" embodied endeavors (25).
What I like so much about this text is how Gherovici frames trans subjectivity as artistic expression. She writes, "It is essential to recognize that choosing to undergo bodily transformation and embracing a gender different from the one assigned at birth can serve as a powerful act of creation—a renaissance, a re-birth that renders life livable" (27). I think this explains why so many conservatives, frankly, hate trans people. Conservatism rejects progress, by definition. Therefore, it makes complete sense that they would direct their anger and hate toward the cohort that represents progress in the most emancipatory way possible. What I also like about this text is its usefulness as a tool for understanding key psychoanalytical concepts. In addition to being relatively short and digestible, Bodies to Wear can be a helpful primer for anyone interested in learning more about psychoanalysis.
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May 12, 2025Aside from the horrendous cover, this is pretty good. I'm still not convinced that Lacan is the best lens through which to work through gender, but it convinced me that it's viable, at the very least.
March 27, 2024
Imperfect but someone had to say it and she does quite well
July 8, 2025
Gherovici's sinthomatic reading of the transgender experience will be remembered for decades as a breath of fresh air in a climate that seeks to pathologize everything it can't essentialize.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews