Transpsychoanalytics

This 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 represented in the issue of on by there is a to the by and in book as to on gender as as to is to what trans* to psychoanalytic in of and and has in trans* the of and the of for trans* most relational of the of and the of the in trans* studies is also in feminist psychoanalytic theory by the of and among and and Salamon trans* studies often feminist psychoanalytic theories to and the feminine is as a sexual as to a female by gender and the turn a issue profiles a of that to trans* the and of trans* to understand as of in to sexual difference. also psychoanalysis a normative and use a by a for the psychical that a to the of the In other trans* subjectivity what of sexual difference. as the of and in issue is not to psychoanalytic of is that and and in of and the in is a to trans* and to the In so doing, is to the of psychoanalytic and theories clinical the the understandings of what as of psychoanalytic on desire, embodiment, and trans* studies new to psychoanalysis, to accept the of the psychoanalytic gender psychoanalytic as as a to Lacan's as is between gender sexual and in between gender and to trans* studies and feminist theories in the Lacanian Moreover, what the gender is to what the of sexual difference. a trans* have been by in gender is because analysts to the of trans* but is for the psychoanalytic because is to in (and of a in of there is to to the of gender as difference. in and the and to the to that is the of but that is (and as the that in Lacanian gender to a have the of sexual but is to that transgender is thus a to sexual as have most is in the of in trans* subjectivity is a to the of sexual difference. feminist psychoanalytic in the of sexual is but that that who they to have of what is on the the who trans* of the of sexual is trans* that to in what that sexual for example, in of in the of of as in to sexual and that the that the gender of the of and also the of trans* studies in and 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