Susan Stryker
Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, University of Arizona
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Susan Stryker
“Psychoanalysis, historically, has not had a good grasp on transgender issues. This is a shame, given that psychoanalytic theory generally offers one of the most robust accounts of subjectivity available to us, and that psychoanalytically-informed clinical practice has great capacity to achieve good therapeutic results for people experiencing psychical suffering. Thankfully that's changing, in no small part through the brilliant revisionist work of Patricia Gherovici, who demonstrates that Lacan was never as hostile to transsexual clients as some of his followers have made him out to be. In her deft handling, the existence of nonpathological transgender subjects brings a transformative pressure to bear on key psychoanalytic concepts, while demonstrating how psychoanalytic insight can help relieve suffering for transgender people without invalidating their way of being in the world.” (from Amazon)
Patricia Gherovici
Patricia Gherovici
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.