From Continuity to Contiguity: A Response to the Fraught Temporality of Gender

Abstract

This paper examines current psychoanalytic engagements with the use of hormone blockers in transsexual children and the underlying premises concerning our understanding of the child's process of coming into his or her gendered self. Rather than taking sides in the debate, I explore how the "hormones question" becomes entangled in a series of misreadings and displacements through which the child's request could potentially be missed. In examining psychoanalytic conceptualizations of the trans child's agency, autonomy, and future and the relation between the natal body and gender, I ask, how is psychoanalytic discourse implicated in the very dilemmas it attempts to elucidate? Specifically, the essay examines critically the psychoanalytic use of continuity, authenticity, and alignment as implicit ideals, interrogates the focus on mourning as therapeutic horizon, and proposes that we conceive of gender as a good-enough placeholder with the potential to carry us from the ideal of continuity to an ethos of contiguity.

Paola on the couch: The quest for feminine identity in an empirically supported psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a trans woman.

“…We believe that if analysts succeed in offering trans people a true recognition of their identity and their body-both actual and perceived-they may use psychoanalysis as a tool for these patients' deep personal evolution. As Winnicott (cited by Gozlan, 2018) states, "we can observe the vicissitudes of transitional phenomena but we can never predict or control them." With trans patients, we agree with Danielle Quinodoz's (1998) suggestion that analysts should assume a countertransferential position of a parent who does not yet know the sex of their offspring.…”

“…We believe that if analysts succeed in offering trans people a true recognition of their identity and their body—both actual and perceived—they may use psychoanalysis as a tool for these patients’ deep personal evolution. As Winnicott (cited by Gozlan, 2018) states, “we can observe the vicissitudes of transitional phenomena but we can never predict or control them.” With trans patients, we agree with Danielle Quinodoz’s (1998) suggestion that analysts should assume a countertransferential position of a parent who does not yet know the sex of their offspring. Gender transition paths are full of tension, fear, and anxiety; patients on this journey must resymbolize and renarrate their own origins, passing through a complex web of meanings and signifiers in a constant tension between internal and external perception.…”

“…For Saketopoulou, hormonal treatments and surgical interventions are not acting outs of unconscious fantasies; rather, they provide trans patients with a new “bodily materiality” that better fits their psychological experience. Recently, Oren Gozlan (2018) explored the possibility for the analytic dyad to explore this new materiality, inviting analysts to provide trans patients with a transitional space (Winnicott, 1971) in which to integrate a new sense of self and draw new meanings from their dilemma. Gozlan (2018) criticized Saketopoulou’s emphasis on the process of mourning: no doubt, transitioning involves a series of mourning, but the transsexual subject is not grieving a vagina, a penis, or breasts .…”

Adolescent Ruthlessness and the Transitioning Of The Analyst’s Mind

“…Considering gender and sexuality as already formed by forces that cannot be prevented or traced to an origin, we may conceptualize development as constituted by interruption (interpolations, interpretations, enigmatic messages). As a process of growth and meaning-making, development is not a continuous progression made through causal ordering, but rather a contiguous process (Gozlan 2018) made through proximity, 9 where relationships are formed between disparate elements. From the vantage of contiguity, there is no such thing as normal development that will safely march the adolescent along the path of “nature.”…”

Transgender Children: From Controvery to Dialogue

“…While these statements may suggest that psychoanalysis is consolidating a position on trans kids and how to care for them, we are also witnessing a growth of psychoanalytic literature that supports young people's access to gender related medical interventions, and is alert to the countertransferential reactions that subtend analysts' anxieties around the subject (Farley and Kennedy 2020;Gozlan 2018;Saketopoulou 2020;Wiggins 2020). "Some psychic conflicts cannot be resolved in the psychic realm, requiring action," writes Avgi Sakteopoulou in a recent debate with David Bell (2020Bell ( , 1025.…”