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.

Introduction

Chapter 1: Transamerica

Chapter 2: Depathologizing trans

Chapter 3: Gender in the blender

Chapter 4: Bring sex back

Chapter 5: Strange bedfellows: psychoanalysis and sexology

Chapter 6: Changing sex, changing psychoanalysis

Chapter 7: A natual experiment

Chapter 8: From trance to trans in Lacan’s revisions of hysteria

Chapter 9: Simulation, expression, and truth

Chapter 10: The sweet science of transition

Chapter 11: The singular universality of trans

Chapter 12: Portraits in a two-way mirror

Chapter 13: Plastic sex, the beauty of it

Chapter 14: That obscure object: from beauty to excrement

Chapter 15: Freud’s scatalog

Chapter 16: The art of artifice

Chapter 17: Clinic of the Clinamen

Chapter 18: Making life livable

Chapter 19: Body trouble

Coda: phallus interruptus, or the snakes’ lesson

Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and award-winning author. Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press, 2003, Gradiva Award and Boyer Prize), Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010), Lacan On Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t (with Manya Steinkoler, Routledge, 2015), and Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy (with Manya Steinkoler, Cambridge University Press, 2016).