Artigo Revisado por pares

Sexual sensations and gender experience the psychological positions and the erotic third

1999; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 9; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10481889909539325

ISSN

1940-9222

Autores

Annie Sweetnam,

Tópico(s)

Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy

Resumo

A gendered person lives in and creates a gendered body. Through the sexual life of the couple, two gendered bodies come together. In this paper, I draw on case material to illustrate how a multitude of sensations associated with what it feels like to be a man or a woman is aroused, affirmed, and created as one dimension of sexual experience. I suggest that these gender sensations may be organized through the three psychological positions—autistic‐contiguous, paranoid‐schizoid, and depressive. The movement among all three positions gives different shapes to sensory‐based gender experience—each position making its own unique contributions to the qualities of what it feels like to be a man or a woman. In one case, I consider the possibility that gender transformation occurred through an unconscious intersubjective erotic third1 —the body of the couple—created between the patient and her husband.

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