Transgender Psychoanalysis

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.

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).

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