Transpsychoanalytics
2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/23289252-4189865
ISSN2328-9260
Autores Tópico(s)African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues
ResumoThis issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly profiles the transgender turn in psychoanalytic theory, and the development of what I refer to as "transpsychoanalytics." This transition has not been easy because psychoanalytic theorists and analysts have often represented trans* subjectivity and gender variance as pathological. Sigmund Freud's early writing on the "masculinity complex" and "penis envy," for example, have been used to render female masculinities (Halberstam 1998) deviant. Jacques Lacan's writing on "transsexualist jouissance" has been used to substantiate claims of trans* mental illness, and contemporary Lacanian psychoanalysts over rely on Catherine Millot's (1989) Horsexe, a book that establishes a metonymic link between trans* feminine subjects and psychosis (Adams 2013; Chiland 2009; Morel 2011; and Shepherdson 2000). This Lacanian tendency to reduce trans* subjectivity to psychosis is evident in most other psychoanalytic paradigms as well, including Freudian, object relations, relational, Kleinian, and feminist psychoanalytic theory (Caldwell and Keshavan 1991; and Siomopoulos 1974).1 Despite a great deal of sophisticated psychoanalytic theorizing on psychical life, there has been a dearth of nonpathologizing psychoanalytic writing on trans* subjectivity informed by clinical practice and cultural critique.This is beginning to change. Original critiques of psychoanalysis by trans* scholars have led to important reassemblages of core psychoanalytic ideas. Moreover, they have challenged understandings of transsexuals as overinvested in normative gender binaries (and thus dupes of gender) and as unable to accept the aporias of sexual difference. Jay Prosser (1998a) and Gayle Salamon (2004) were among the first trans* studies scholars to use Freud's writing on the bodily ego to understand trans* embodiments of sex. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, Shanna Carlson (2010), Sheila Cavanagh (2016b and 2016c), Patricia Gherovici (2010), Oren Gozlan (2014), and Patricia Elliot (2001) have not only critiqued the reduction of trans* to pathology but also effectively used psychoanalytic theories to advance a nonpathologizing understanding of trans* identification. In so doing, they have developed new understandings of trans* embodiment, desire, and jouissance. Among clinical psychoanalysts of the relational school, who are well represented in the special issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues on "Transgender Subjectivities" guest edited by Virginia Goldner (2011), there is a concerted effort to "distinguish 'psychodynamic' suffering from the trans-phobic 'cultural' suffering caused by stigma, fear and hatred" (154). Adrienne Harris, in her book Gender as Soft Assembly (2012), invites us to focus on gender as process as opposed to structure. Her objective is to consider what trans* offers to psychoanalytic thought in terms of "being" and "meaning." Avgi Saketopoulou (2011 and 2014) has written insightfully about "gender trauma" in work with trans* clients. Alessandra Lemma (2013) stresses the role of mirroring and the importance of "being seen" (277) for her trans* clients. Like most relational clinicians critical of transphobia, Lemma considers the impact of transphobia and the importance of "witnessing" transsexualities (in the plural). Compelling work in trans* studies is also happening in feminist psychoanalytic theory influenced by the formative writings of Helene Cixous, Bracha L. Ettinger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig, among others (Cavanagh 2016b and 2016c; and Salamon 2004). Although trans* studies often ignores feminist psychoanalytic theories understood (often with just cause) to be essentialist and transphobic, multiple more-progressive readings are possible when the feminine is approached as a sexual position, as opposed to a natal female corporeal "truth" fixed by gender or biology.To exhibit and circumscribe the turn toward a transpsychoanalytics, this issue profiles a range of innovative works that refuse to pathologize trans* subjectivity. Each author psychoanalytically engages the beauty, complexity, and viability of trans* lives. These paradigm-shifting works invite us to understand transsubjectivities as creative ways of being in relation to unconscious sexual difference. They also push psychoanalysis beyond a normative Oedipal and cisgender conceptual frame. To use a term suggested by Franz Kaltenbeck (1992), transsexuality can supply a belvédère for the clinic: an open psychical architecture or vantage point that offers a "beautiful view" from which to consider the life of the subject. In other words, trans* subjectivity can tell us something about what Lacanians call "the real"—the unsymbolizable domain of sexual difference. But as the rich assortment of articles and statements included in this issue demonstrate, transpsychoanalytics is not beholden to any one psychoanalytic paradigm or theorist. The strength of transpsychoanalytics is that it cuts across paradigmatic borders and is, unabashedly, hybrid and trans-generative in its reading of desire and subjectivity.What unites the transpsychoanalytic writings in this collection is a willingness to value trans* experience and make it central to the analysis. In so doing, each contributor is committed to expanding the boundaries of existing psychoanalytic concepts and theories guiding clinical work. At the same time, the contributors shift our understandings of what counts as "trans* studies" toward greater inclusion of psychoanalytic perspectives on desire, sexuality, embodiment, and subjectivity. For trans* studies readers new to psychoanalysis, it may take time to accept the critique of identity built into the psychoanalytic premise. Gender identity—all gender identities—in psychoanalytic terms are defenses against difference as well as a way to frame our desire.Let us take Lacan's approach as an example. There is no one-to-one correspondence between gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexuated positions in his model. The manifest distinctions between gender identity and sex morphology central to trans* studies and feminist theories are radically undone in the Lacanian approach. Moreover, what the English-speaking world calls gender identity is ill equipped to manage what Lacan calls the aporia of sexual difference. More than a few trans* analysands have been troubled by their analyst's disinterest in gender identity. Sometimes this is because analysts are resistant to the specific identifications of trans* clients, but it is also, for the psychoanalytic clinician, because identity is inherently defensive. While many transpeople are accustomed to having their genders invalidated in social circuits (and this is, of course, a problem in need of redress), there is an equally significant problem to be addressed with respect to the function of all gender identifications as defenses against difference. Identities unify ambiguity in normalizing ways, order and regulate the drives, and attempt to protect the subject from anxiety. They inevitably fail. It may seem paradoxical to note that "failure is the measure of recognition" (Butler 2006, x), but let us consider that it is where (and when) we, as subjects, escape the norm that we can be apprehended in our uniqueness.In Lacanian terms, gender helps us to negotiate a larger problem we have with the real of sexual difference, but it is incorrect to conclude that transgender is thus a way to override sexual difference, as some Lacanians, following Millot (1989), have done. The most recent example is in Slavoj Žižek's controversial talk at the London School of Economics in 2016 (Coffman 2012; Gossett 2016). Contra Žižek, trans* subjectivity is a viable way to negotiate the impasse of sexual difference. As feminist psychoanalytic theorist Jacqueline Rose (2016) writes in "Who Do You Think You Are?," the "bar of sexual difference is ruthless but that doesn't mean that those who believe they subscribe to its law [i.e., nontrans* subjects] have any more idea of what is going on beneath the surface than the one who submits less willingly [i.e., trans* subjects]" (8). While none of us can evade the question of unconscious sexual difference, it is trans* experience that enables us to think in more profound ways about what that sexual difference consists of. Che Gossett (2016), for example, in their critique of Žižek in the Los Angeles Review of Books, reads systems of racialization as structured, in part, through recourse to sexual difference and argues that "Žižek ignores the fact that we can't think the gender binary outside of the context of racial slavery and colonialism within which it was forged. Žižek also leaves unthought the entire scope of trans* studies in general and trans* of color critique in particular."The pretense of cis-normativity and the concordant presumption of trans-pathology are not only erroneous but, in my view, defenses, used by nontranspeople, against the very difference Žižek, as a Lacanian, understands to be the bedrock of subjectivity. Public discourse surrounding transsexuality is "stalled," as one contributor to this special issue punningly points out, in the toilet. But this inability to think about sexual difference in other ways, in trans* sex specific ways, is psychically invested and bound to painful repetition.2 This is why psychoanalysis—the famous "talking cure" (Breuer and Freud [1895] 1995) whereby messy, unconscious material can be subject to analysis—is so important. The proverbial "shit" that happens in everyday life must be worked through if it is to become a fertile ground for change.Psychoanalysts have a lot to say about how shit functions in psychic life. British object relations theory, shaped by the formative work of Sándor Ferencz (1873–1933), Melanie Klein (1882–1960), and Donald Winnicott (1896–1971), among others, is about nothing if not how we come to treat others like shit. Klein, for example, in 1946, theorized "projective identification" as an unconscious psychical process through which we split off a part of our selves and project it onto another person. Projective identification is an object relations defense whereby good and bad objects, feelings, desires, fantasies, etc., are put upon another person. But more than this, projective identification occurs when the subject at whom a projection is directed comes to identify with the affective material projected by another person (Klein 1946).That projective "disowning" can be understood in terms of abjection, a discarding and devaluing of what one wishes to divorce from the self in order to produce subjective coherence and "purity." In her work on the sociopsychic life of gender, Judith Butler notes that abjection "designates a degraded or cast out status within the terms of sociability" (1993: 242n2). She also explains that through "social abjection, people constituted as Other, or as different, are literally banished to 'zones of inhabitability'" (Butler 1990: 243). Writing about masculinities in literature, Calvin Thomas (2008) contends that "abjection assuages, discharges, or 'gets rid' of a subject's own 'god-awful feeling' of scatontological anxiety by punitively projecting that affect onto a degraded 'other' who is forced to assume the fecal position" (147). The analytic of abjection put forward by Julia Kristeva (1982), which leads her to characterize human excrement as the "most striking example of the interference of the organic with the social" (75), is especially apropos of current public discourse on the presence of transgender people in public toilets. I have used Kristeva's notion of abjection in Queering Bathrooms (2010) to understand how the difficulties people have with gender, sexuality, and the body become displaced onto LGBTQ people in public toilets. Identity-based borders, like public toilets, are frantic zones of aggressive projection whereby one person's disavowed difficulties with gender get projected onto others, often in aggressive ways.Countering transphobia is shitty work, and transpsychoanalytics prompts us to turn the analytic gaze to those institutions, modalities of thought, and actors who, consciously and unconsciously, treat trans* people like shit. The contributors to this issue mine a new transpsychoanalytic field, thereby turning this experiential shit into analytic gold. This is epistemological work of broad relevance to the psychoanalytic project. In what follows, I review the scholarship that undergirds the new transpsychoanalytic approach before offering capsule summaries of the articles included in this issue. Like all reviews, it is selective, and I focus primarily on Lacanian scholarship that intersects with, and seriously engages, trans* cultural studies. This is in part because it is primarily Lacanian-inspired theorists who are now engaging trans* studies in new and progressive ways. It is also because Virginia Goldner (2011) has already admirably showcased relational psychoanalysts who are also doing trans-positive work in clinical settings.Although trans* studies scholarship and psychoanalysis proceed along different theoretical tracks and, perhaps understandably, have different conceptual projects and political agendas, there are significant areas of crossing that are productive points of dialogic entry. One of the first and most important examples of trans* studies engagements with psychoanalysis is to be found in Jay Prosser's (1998a) early work on transsexual embodiment, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. He is, to the best of my knowledge, the first scholar to bring the budding field of trans* cultural studies into conversation with psychoanalysis. Prosser engages important psychoanalytic insights having to do with the bodily ego as theorized by Freud, the mirror-stage as theorized by Lacan, and the skin-ego as theorized by Didier Anzieu. He anticipated the Lacanian concept of the sinthome (one's idiosyncratic manner of identifying with one's psychical symptom, and thus coming to enjoy unconscious life), which Lacan developed in a seminar translated into English only in 2016, by making the materiality of the body, and trans* sex materiality in particular, central to his analysis of transsexual autobiographical narratives and photographic images. He did much to delineate trans* studies as a field of research distinct from queer theory. Prosser is especially critical of the way "transsexuality" figures as a trope in queer writings on gender without due attention to trans* embodiment and corporeality. Prosser thus offers an important critique of queer theory in general, and of Judith Butler's (1990) writing on gender performativity in particular. Notably, Prosser wrote that the "transsexual reveals queer theory's own limits" (6). As Prosser observes, in "transsexuality sex returns, the queer repressed, to unsettle its theory of gender performativity" (Prosser 1998a: 27).Prosser is also critical of the sociocultural constructionist approach. Too often, this approach asks how transsexuality is constructed by way of medicine, technology, and gender role socialization without due attention to the agency of transsexual subjects. He contends that, owing, in part, to the disproportionate focus on the body as an effect of discourse, the "transsexual is read as either a literalization of discourse—in particular the discourse of gender and sexuality—or its deliteralization" (13). As such, transsexuals are, in queer theoretical circles, too often "condemned for reinscribing as referential the primary categories of ontology and the natural that postructuralism seeks to deconstruct" (13). Prosser is right to be critical of the way transsexuals have been positioned as dupes of gender in some strands of queer, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory. Transpeople are often accused of taking the body "too" seriously or, alternatively, using the body to illustrate the instability of the flesh by transitioning.3 Either option puts transpeople in an untenable position. Prosser's intention is to carve out a "living space" for transpeople that lies between reinscription (where transpeople are presumed to reify gender polarities) and subversion (where transpeople are presumed to exceed gender polarities). To do so, Prosser finds it necessary to challenge the reduction of bodily materiality, on the one hand, to discourse (Michel Foucault) and, on the other hand, to the play of the signifier (Jacques Lacan). For Prosser, bodily materiality in Foucault, Butler, Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and the other poststructuralists never refers to the flesh (13). He is deeply critical of what he views as a "deliteralization of sex" in Judith Butler's oeuvre, and while he duly notes that his own work in trans* studies is enabled by Butler's scholarship, perhaps the strongest and most sustained area of critique in Second Skins is to be found in his reading of her books Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter.Prosser makes much of the Butlerian distinction between gender as "on," as opposed to "in," the body. In Butler's account, through phantasy we acquire a sex, but this sex is, as the theory goes, gender all along. Turning to Freud, Prosser argues that Butler's analysis depends upon an understanding of the body as a psychical projection that has no "material" weight. He contends that Butler misreads Freud's original notes on the bodily ego, in which Freud wrote that "the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface" (Prosser 1998a: 19–20). As Prosser notes, Butler reads the "it" as body rather than as ego. Freud's objective, according to Prosser, was precisely the opposite: to better understand the "bodily origins of the ego, the conception of the ego as product of the body not the body as product of the ego" (41).Prosser insists that Freud's conception of the bodily ego was an attempt to "materialize the psyche," not to "dematerialize the body" (42). The privileging of surfaces in Butler's account of gender performativity converts what Prosser calls "corporeal interiority" into fantasy. To remedy Butler's error, Prosser sets off in search of what he calls "material reality," a "literality and referentiality" (58) central to the sexed body that he believes queer theory obfuscates. In pursuit of this quest, he turns his attention to theorizing the skin and the flesh of the body through Didier Anzieu's ([1985] 1989) conceptualization of the skin-ego. Anzieu was a Parisian psychoanalyst and philosopher who wrote extensively about Freudian self-analysis, projection, and group psychoanalysis and, after breaking off his own analysis with Lacan, became a staunch critic of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Anzieu took issue with the privileged position Lacan assigned to the signifier relative to sensory and phenomenological systems.Prosser's engagement with the skin-ego is curious, if not paradoxical, because it returns our attention to the body's surface, and he is at pains to theorize the transsexual trajectory as being authorized by something other than the body's surface as he claims that queer poststructuralists, following Butler, have done. Unfortunately, Prosser does not fully engage the psychic apparatus central to Freud's conceptualization of the bodily ego. He treats the bodily ego as a tool for stressing the significance of materiality while, ultimately, extracting it from phantasy, desire, and the unconscious processes Freud saw as central to it. There is nothing "un-phantasmatic" about the bodily ego, as Prosser would have it be (1998a: 44). For Freud, the bodily ego is a mental projection of a surface and, as such, involves a narcissistic investment in the self as coherent. This coherence is not biologically determined. It is a psychical process. Butler is, in my reading, not wrong to say that Freud's bodily ego anticipates Jacques Lacan's later work on the mirror-stage. Prosser is right to note that for Lacan the "body is the ego's misrecognition" (42) in the mirror, but he misleads us when he writes that for Freud "the body is the site of the ego's conception" (42). Prosser's (1998a) focus on the skin does not enable him to explain why the transsexual body feels false, hollow, or empty, or why there is a sex specificity to this feeling of bodily alienation. He does offer interesting elaborations of how one can fail to take ownership of the skin, of psychodermatology, bodily agnosia, depersonalization, bodily modification practices, somatic memory, the "missing limb" phenomenon discussed by Oliver Sacks, and other related topics. But Prosser is not able to explain how the specificity of the skin is linked to the specific question of trans* sex embodiment.Nevertheless, what Second Skins offers to a transpsychoanalytics is of utmost importance. Prosser asks us to consider, along with Anzieu, that tactility, the felt sense of the body's contours, as opposed to visuality, how the body looks, plays an important role in sexed embodiment. By asking queer theorists to consider what is that part of the body that is not "gender all along" (77), he, and the field of trans* studies more generally, is asking a vital question. Prosser prompts psychoanalysts to account for what might cause a subject to disidentify with a sex assigned at birth. Additionally, Prosser's formulation of fantasies specific to trans* subjects is compelling. The fantasy of "recovering" through sex reassignment surgery (SRS) a body that should have been there all along resonates for many transpeople. Prosser writes affirmatively and engagingly about surgery as a bodily rite, about transsexual desire for coherence (203), about the importance of feeling "at home." In reading transsexuality through narrative and maintaining that the transsexual body is made possible through the narrativization of the transitions of sex (5), Prosser has done much to underscore the importance of trans* experience to the psychoanalytic clinic and to theories of gender, sex, and embodiment more generally.In her article "The Bodily Ego and the Contested Domain of the Material," Gayle Salamon (2004) offers an impressive review of selected psychoanalytic, queer, and phenomenological approaches to materiality. She is guided by the question: "How does the body manifest a sex?" (95). Like Prosser, Salamon returns to Freud's Three Essays ([1905] 1975) to mine psychoanalytic theories of materiality, but she does so with greater attention to the interplay between the body, its visual representation, and discourse. It is this focus on the visual realm of fantasy, as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theorization of the phenomenology of perception (1962), that Salamon finds most helpful for theorizing trans* embodiment. She is more sympathetic than Prosser to Butler's (1993) reading of sex morphology, the imaginary, and erotogenicity through Freud and Lacan. Unlike Prosser, Salamon explains that the Freudian bodily ego is a projection of a surface that must involve the operation of fantasy.What Salamon finds useful in Freud's writing on sexuality is the fact that the sex of the body does not determine sexual identification. While Freud was committed to developing a universal theory of sexual difference, he could not do it because the so-called "fact" of biology was, for him, muddied by an ever-present awareness of "hermaphroditism, both psychologically and biologically" (Salamon 2004: 102). Far from regarding hermaphroditism as "abnormal," Freud read it as an indicator of a universal inclination toward bisexuality. This universal bisexuality was, for Freud, following Wilhelm Fleiss (1858–1928), a part of the human condition. From this premise he reasoned that masculinity and femininity cannot be assured by biology. While contemporary readers view hermaphroditism as an intersex condition, it was also, for Freud, a form of sexual inversion.4Like Prosser, Salamon stresses that Freud's concept of the bodily ego is of particular use in thinking transgenderism because it shows that the body of which one has a "felt sense" is not necessarily contiguous with the physical body as it is perceived from the outside, including the relationship between sex identity and genitalia (2004: 96). This is the crucial insight that anchors Salamon's archeological mapping of the psychoanalytic terrain to pinpoint ideas relevant to the materialization of the body. She is particularly interested in the way the erotogenic zones Freud discusses in Three Essays confound any stable sense of bodily unity. While Prosser persuasively argues that discourse does not enable us to understand the bodily significance of the ego (and is thus invested in theorizing materiality apart from discourse), Salamon is interested in how, precisely, discourse enables us to "assume a body" that is neither biologically given nor static. Bodies, rather, are characterized by their lability, as opposed to their fixity, in her account. As such, Salamon believes that Prosser's search for a materially grounded body image is a diversion from the more important question having to do with how the body image "allows for a resignification of materiality itself" (117). Salamon concludes that Prosser's commitment to a materialist approach does not enable him to fully actualize psychoanalytic insight relating to gender and sexual difference. She is right to note that we cannot found subjectivity on a "bodily materiality that is ostensibly nondiscursive" and that insofar as Prosser does so, he impossibly "places the subject in a 'domain of radical alterity'" (119) or, in Lacanian terms, the real.Salamon (2004) finds it necessary to engage Lacanian theory but does so alongside other, more phenomenologically engaged theorists such as Merleau-Ponty and Paul Schilder (1886–1940), a Viennese psychoanalyst and student of Freud. Schilder's The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (1950) is, in my view, one of the most understudied texts in body studies, with great resources for trans* studies. It offers a theoretically robust engagement with questions of embodiment linked to, among myriad other topics, depersonalization, transposition, disassociation, psychosomatic integrity, hysteria, psychosomatic symptoms, neurasthenia, pain and masochism, phantom limbs, hypochondria, narcissism, agnosia, and the phenomenology of perception—even erthrophobia (fear of blushing). Schilder's position is that psychoanalysis has "neglected the structure of the schema of the body" (201). He demonstrates that "every desire and libidinous tendency immediately changes the structure of the image of the body and gets its real meaning out of this change in the postural model of the body" (201). More specifically, Schilder argues that we have access to our bodies through what he calls a "body image." This image is a psychically invested internal representation of the body; it is not singular but multiple, and it must be reinforced. This reinforcement comes by way of touch, erotogenicity, affect, and visual and sensory perception. More significantly, when the body image changes, what counts as the materiality of the body concordantly changes with it. Schilder's observations that the "body is certainly not only where the borderline of the body and its clothes are" (211) is certainly consistent with trans* scholarly observations about embodiment.Although Salamon productively draws upon Schilder's work to underscore the lability of the body, its operation of memory, its sensory systems, nerve impulses, fantasies, and so forth, she is ultimately unsatisfied and suggests that the body image cannot be the only way we attain a sense of materiality. Referring directly to Schilder's discussion of kinesthetic and tactile impressions, Salamon writes, "Without the libidinal investment that can only be routed to the body through the mediating effect of the body image, the stuff of the body is reduced to 'vague material' without shape or form" (112). This critique of Schilder is not entirely accurate. Schilder's reference to "vague material" is specific to a larger discussion about a particular patient he treated who was experiencing psychosomatic symptoms that led the patient to feeling his body outside its material contours. Schilder uses this example not only to illustrate how we "overrate the cohesion of the body" (Schilder 1950: 165) but also to explicate what he actually calls a "queer exteriorization of feeling which made him [the patient] feel that parts of his own body were lying in the street" (166; emphasis added). Where Salamon could have made a more significant critique of Schilder of relevance to trans* studies is with the doctor's relative neglect of Freud's writing on sexual difference.There is little attention in Schilder's work to what Freud calls "sexual difference" except when he discusses patients who, by contemporary standards, would count as transsexual! In Schilder's discussion of the "sociology" of the "body image," he attends to one patient in particular who "plays the part of a woman" (1950: 234). Although Schilder doesn't name this patient "transsexual" (or even "sexual invert"), it is clear from the case description that his "male" client is dealing with a postural model of the body complicated by what Schilder calls a "feminine situation." Far from pathologizing his patient, Schilder uses this case study to illuminate the psychosociality of the bodily image. He writes, "No better instance could be given of the fact that in an individual's own postural image many postural images of others are melted together" (234). The melding together of the various postural images of others occurs, Schilder writes, "under the influence of an erotic need" (234). To his credit, Schilder does not use his patient to illustrate pathology or deviant psychosexual development. It is, rather, an indication of the extent to which body image is shaped by identificatory circu
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