1st Edition
The Queerness of Psychoanalysis From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond
The Queerness of Psychoanalysis is an exploration of psychoanalysis’ often complicated and fraught history with thinking about queerness, as well as its multifaceted heritage.
Throughout the chapters, the contributors write about psychoanalysis’ relationship with queerness, the ways in which queerness is represented in the psychoanalytic archive and how that archive endures in the present, creating various disruptive effects both within and beyond the clinic. Each chapter from the global cohort of contributors approaches queerness from a different angle: they consider the literary aspects of queerness’ presence in the analytic world; the clinical complexities of working with queer and trans people; metapsychological inclusion and exclusion of queerness, and many other subjects. Taken together, these contributions constitute a decisive intervention into the psychoanalytic canon. They are an unabashed demand for accepting and furthering the representation and inclusion of queer and in particular trans people within psychoanalysis. It is a call for action to utilise and deepen psychoanalysis’ enormous explicatory powers and bring together voices that have so far been denied a unity of expression, while critically reevaluating psychoanalysis’ historical relationship to queerness. Each chapter proposes different ways of thinking and writing psychoanalytically, with many of the papers queering the format and forms of expression commonly found in academic writing, through their use of dialogues, conversations, or other experimental forms of writing.
Written almost exclusively by analysts, scholars and activists who identify as trans and/or queer, this important volume puts theory into practice by centering queer and trans voices.
Introduction
Vanessa Sinclair, Elisabeth Punzi, and Myriam Sauer
1. Gird your Loins: The Transgender Psychoanalysts are Coming
Tobias Wiggins
2. On the Cage of Gender: Perspectives on an Ethics of Sexual Différance
Esther Hutfless
3. Emptiness is the Cure for Psychoanalysis
Myriam Sauer
4. Tiresias as the Patron Saint of Psychoanalysis: On the Integral Mutations of Psychoanalysis
Simone A. Medina Polo
5. H.D. & Bryher: Psychoanalysis, Mysticism, and Gender
Elisabeth Punzi
6. Trans Childhoods and the Family Romance
M.E. O’Brien
7. Transsexuality at the Origin of Desire: Or, Schreber’s Satanic Handjob
Luce deLire
8. Sissy Dance $1: The More and More of Gender
Griffin Hansbury and Avgi Saketopoulou
9. Dragging Psychoanalysis
Geoffrey Hervey and Lara Sheehi
10. Erotophobia: Or, Isn’t Everyone A Pervert?
Gila Ashtor
11. Freud Would Not Be Queer Without Us: An Autotheory on Psychoanalysis as Queer Praxis
Molly Merson
12. Credo: So Our Lives Glide On
Ken Corbett
Biography
Vanessa Sinclair is a psychoanalyst based in Sweden, who works with people internationally. She is the host of Rendering Unconscious Podcast and a founding member of Das Unbehagen: A Free Association for Psychoanalysis. She sits on the International Advisory Board of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and is an Editorial Advisor for Parapraxis Magazine. Dr. Sinclair is the author of Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art: The Cut in Creation (2021) and the editor of Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Films of Ingmar Bergman: From Freud to Lacan and Beyond (2023) and On Psychoanalysis and Violence: Contemporary Lacanian Perspectives (2019) with Manya Steinkolern.
Elisabeth Punzi is a licensed psychologist and a lecturer at the Department of Psychology at Gothenburg University (GU), Sweden. She leads a project concerning heritage and health at the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, GU and teaches psychoanalytic theory, psychology of religion and qualitative research methods, and many other topics.
Myriam Sauer is a PhD canditate at the Latin-America Institute of Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany, as well as a writer and poet. Her primary academic interests lie in the fields of psychoanalysis, queer studies, literature, and sociology.
'Here is a book whose authors immerse themselves in the histories and discourses of psychoanalysis and the forces of cultural and political ideologies to offer reflective and critical analyses of the psychoanalytic “treatment” of queerness. These insightful and at times provocative essays reflect on the quotidian aspects of queer lived lives, the fragilities of the contemporary era, and how they can meaningful interact with a discipline of psychoanalysis fit for the 21st century.'
Eve Watson, Psychoanalyst and Writer, Dublin
'Psychoanalysis will be queer or it will not be. Against dismissals of psychoanalysis as outdated, biased, patriarchal, heterosexist, transphobic, racist, colonial, and bourgeois, every essay in this book challenges prejudice, debunking myths and assumptions about psychoanalysis while reorienting it brilliantly.'
Patricia Gherovici, Psychoanalyst and author of Transgender Psychoanalysis, Philadelphia
'Queerness in Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond is a collection of papers that works to provoke, deepen and broaden our psychoanalytic thinking, to take seriously the views of queer subjects, scholarship, psychoanalysts and philosophers. These papers pushed me to learn psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas and schools of thought beyond the limits of my training and exposure. The interdisciplinary scope of the collection offers a unique challenge to curious, expansive readers of psychoanalysis. Raising the voices of queer, trans and gender non-binary people is a welcomed gift and urgent necessity for psychoanalysis at a time when the field still clings to views that pathologize and devalue queer people and seek to marginalize and exclude our input.'
Jack Pula, MD, New York
