Review: "Transgender Psychoanalysis" by Patricia Gherovici
by Woody Brown
Review of Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference by Patricia Gherovici (Routledge, 2017). Originally published in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society volume 23, 360-363 (2018). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-018-0100-5.
It has been clear for some time that the “transgender moment,” as it has been called by The New York Times, presents a problem for psychoanalysis. This is due in part to the compulsion among a certain contingent of Lacanian psychoanalysts and theorists to pathologize trans identities as fundamentally psychotic—as if neurosis is a legible text but psychosis does not require anything beyond reparative intervention. In this way, they have sidestepped the invaluable questions posed by the trans analysand and the generalizable implications those questions have for the metapsychology. Patricia Gherovici, a practicing psychoanalyst and the author of several books, including The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press, 2003) and Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010), uses her practical experience working with trans individuals to bring a distinctly clinical orientation to her corrective investigation of the novel reading of transgenderism—and of gender in general—that a rigorously psychoanalytic orientation demands we make.
Gherovici begins Transgender Psychoanalysis by grounding the text in the unique situation of the present. “When I began working on transgender issues,” she writes, “I had not foreseen then that I would be riding a wave that has swept away everything else in pop culture’s imagination and also engulfed most psychiatric and psychoanalytic practices” (2). Prominent trans individuals like Caitlyn Jenner, Janet Mock, and Laverne Cox stand at the visible forefront of a vast cultural interrogation of notions of gender, sexuality, kinship, identity, and essentialism in general. In addition, according to Gherovici, “the transgender experience, a movement that unravels identity as a construction, can help us rethink race and ethnicity, highlighting their ideological determinations” (4). Though she discusses in the introduction the provocative case of Rachel Dolezal, the former president of the Spokane branch of the NAACP who resigned in 2015 after her parents outed her as white, Gherovici largely neglects to revisit the fascinating questions about race that she poses in the book’s initial pages. There is, as Gherovici’s ruminations on race and gender imply, a clear asymmetry between the two. The reasons why that is are, in the end, beyond the scope of Transgender Psychoanalysis, but one hopes that the author and others will take up the crucial paths that Gherovici has beaten through the discourse. Why is it, indeed, that the notion of transitioning between genders (or of embodying a space outside the rigid binary) is met with celebration by cultural progressivism but the idea of a “trans-racial” identity, to use Dolezal’s phrase, is met with derision and mockery (4)? And what roles do history, suffering, community, and oppression play in the formation of identities that are supposedly individual? Charles Shepherdson has examined these and other issues illuminatingly in his chapter, “Human Diversity and the Sexual Relation,” in Lacan and the Limits of Language (Fordham University Press, 2008).
“Psychoanalysis needs sex realignment,” Gherovici writes, “and the time is now” (2). By returning to a rigorous understanding of Lacan’s notion of sexuation, she aims to do two things: first, “to problematize the notion of castration and argue that transgender issues are relevant beyond the confines of the pathologization of trans experiences, and can thus be universalized” (7); and second, to “rethink sexual difference without the notion of phallus” using the sinthome, a concept Lacan developed in Seminar XXIII: The Sinthome, 1975-1976, recently translated into English by A. R. Price. Gherovici successfully maneuvers beyond the irresolvable nature/culture aporia by clarifying “the distinction between sexuality ([Lacan] called it sexual difference or sexuation), anatomical sex, and symbolically constructed gender” (6). As Shepherdson writes, “[R]eaders are frequently encouraged to decide whether ‘sexual difference’ refers to sex or gender—that is, whether psychoanalysis is a disguised form of naturalism, a version of essentialism, or whether it regards sexual difference as a ‘symbolic formation,’ thereby coinciding with historicist theories of gender. In fact, however, neither is the case. In psychoanalysis, ‘sexual difference’ is neither a symbolic construction nor a biological reality” (177). The eternal dynamo of bivalent argument arises precisely in order to veil the real of sexual difference: “From the point of view of the Freudian unconscious,” Gherovici writes, “there is an impasse on sexual difference; the sexual binary is the symptom of this impasse” (33). That does not mean, however, that the binary is a reparable fault within discourse. As Heidegger writes in Being and Time regarding our understanding of Being, “its very indefiniteness is itself a positive phenomenon which needs to be clarified” (25).
We can see three distinct political orientations with regard to the real of sexual difference. First, certain queer and gender theorists bear witness to the fact that human existence exceeds the gender binary and purport to move beyond it by recognizing the operation only of a fundamental and universal queerness, thereby abolishing categorization altogether. Even if we ignore the historical (and present) operation of sexuation, however, naming something always names its opposite or its inverse, a second category that reminds us, lest we forget, of the tyranny of discourse. Second, an ideological approach that we might call conservative understands the totality of categories at a certain moment in time, a certain past present, as the correct sum total. Any subsequent deviation from this categorial totality in either name or number is therefore erroneous. Third, a liberal approach creates a limitless sequence of ostensibly novel categories with the explicit goal of finally overcoming the categorizing function of the symbolic order in an aleatory manner by happening upon a hypothetical correct number of categories and thereby indexing completely human experience, not unlike the eschatology of Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God.” As Gherovici notes, the “semantic excess” of this latter approach “ventures in the direction of a surplus of being that defies categorization” (30).
Transgender Psychoanalysis positions the sinthome as what is missing from these accounts. According to Gherovici, the sinthome has been misunderstood as a bulwark against a latent psychosis; instead, we should understand it as “the trace of the unique way someone enjoys his or her unconscious” (9), a structure that is less a bandage and more a unique, creative way of tightening the Borromean knot of the three registers (imaginary, symbolic, real) that generates art (152). Gherovici recognizes that psychoanalysts have historically understood Lacan’s position on James Joyce, who features prominently in Seminar XXIII, as a diagnosis of psychosis, but she disagrees. In fact, the sinthome is not unique to psychosis—its existence is made necessary by the fact that there is, as Lacan famously said in Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, “no such thing as a sexual relation”; that is, there is no inherent complementarity between the valences of human sexuality. Something always escapes the bounds of the vision of oneness that Plato has Aristophanes relate in The Symposium. As Gherovici writes, “Between man and woman, and between men and men, and between women and women, there is nothing but difference. All combinations are possible but there is no symmetry” (30). In the end, Gherovici explains, Lacan claimed that “normative heterosexuality was a sinthome and that sexual positioning also constitutes a symptom—sinthome-she or sinthome-he, he called them. Being a ‘he’ or a ‘she’ would be seen as creations that attempt to ‘make up’ for the disharmony between the sexes” (149). And, like all things that straddle the borders between the three orders (the incest taboo, for instance, or the gold standard), gender qua sinthome paradoxically gives rise to the problem it supposedly addresses. Regarding the nature/culture aporia the incest taboo instantiates, Shepherdson, echoing Heidegger, writes, “The scandalous or paradoxical character of the incest prohibition is not an ambiguity to be eliminated, but must rather be taken as the actual positive content of the concept itself: it suggests that, properly speaking, the incest taboo must be situated prior to the division between nature and culture” (19). Like gender, it touches the real and originates in the hors-texte.
In order to approach the sinthome as the revolutionary concept she understands it to be, Gherovici takes significant pains to clear away certain misperceptions that have guided psychoanalytic encounters with trans analysands and to deconstruct the essentialism at the heart of Catherine Millot’s reading of transsexuality as horsexe, “outside sexuality” (82). As Gherovici notes astutely, being outside sex is not necessarily the sole purview of psychosis; in fact, hysteria is constituted by the fundamental question the hysteric’s being asks: “Am I man or woman?” The basic and irresolvable uncertainty about gender that hysteria comprises is essential for understanding the unique aspects of transgender subjectivity that a diagnosis of psychosis leaves fatally unaddressed. Chief among these, perhaps, is the unparalleled suicidality exhibited by trans analysands, something that Gherovici, with refreshing rigor, reads as a signifier not simply of suffering but of a relation to one’s body as something that “could simply fall from one’s self, like a wrapping that does not fully hold” (146). With this in mind, Gherovici offers her understanding of trans memoir, artwork, and performance as, like Joyce’s writing, a way of holding together a self the circumstances of whose selfhood threaten to annihilate it, and as a way of affirming selfhood. She cites Lacan’s observations on the “unbearable splendor” of Antigone after she has rejected Creon’s dictate and embraced her own law, when she emerges bathed in the radiance of τό κάλλος, which Philippe Nonet defines as “the radiant presence in which beings show themselves in the integrity of their being” (“Antigone’s Law,” 332). This is what Gherovici finds in the performances and testimony of trans individuals. “When they say ‘I am beautiful,’” she writes, “the stress is more on ‘I am’ than on ‘beautiful’” (114). And this, in the end, is universal.
Works Cited
- Heidegger, M. Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson. Harper Perennial, 2008.
- Nonet, P. “Antigone’s Law.” Law, Culture and the Humanities 2: 314-335. 2006.
- Shepherdson, C. “The Intimate Alterity of the Real” and “Human Diversity and the Sexual Relation.” Lacan and the Limits of Language. Fordham University Press, 2008.
Woody Brown is a communications professional based in Buffalo, NY. Before that, he was a book critic and a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature.
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