This post is also available in:
Français (French) 
Italiano (Italian) 
Português (Portuguese (Brazil)) 
Español (Spanish)
Gender Clinic in Psychoanalysis (2006-2025)
Between 2006 and 2025, I attempted to develop a number of proposals for a Gender Clinic in Psychoanalysis.
The Gender Clinic starts from the observation that classical psychoanalysis is in crisis in the face of new sexual and gender identities. Traditional categories (man/woman, heterosexuality/homosexuality) are no longer sufficient to account for contemporary subjective and clinical realities. The task, then, is to explore modes of sexuation outside the binary of convenience, where the experience of gender is integrated as a central element—not of subjectivation, but of the creation of sex.
Gender issues are not the only matter psychoanalysis takes up in current affairs, but they are a salient aspect that mobilises thought; for that reason, it seemed worthwhile to make them a specific chapter of my work. These findings do not reflect the full variety of constructions made possible over the course of a psychoanalytic treatment, an analysis; rather, they focus on a few elaborations that have become necessary in order to proceed with gender, with sex, as they stand in the foreground of our social, cultural, civilisational, sexual, economic, etc. present.
The lack of theorisation that includes contemporary sexual realities compels us to share our findings—and that is good news. Here are those I believe may be useful to anyone who wishes, wherever they may stand in experience, to support their own elaborations. For example, to take up again our thinking on constitutive psychic bisexuality and that of the Phallus as the signified of Jouissance, as well as the way gender presents itself and redefines what we thought we knew about sex.
The lack of theorisation that includes contemporary sexual realities compels us to share our findings—and that is good news. Here are those I believe may be useful to anyone who wishes, wherever they may stand in experience, to support their own elaborations. For example, to take up again our thinking on constitutive psychic bisexuality and that of the Phallus as the signified of Jouissance, as well as the way gender presents itself and redefines what we thought we knew about sex.
Far from considering gender as a simple sociopolitical issue, the aim is to show that it is a lever for rethinking psychoanalysis itself. Gender relaunches the sexual and sex by opening onto subjective experiences that can no longer be confined within certain categories. “Gender is an imaginary object to which sex corresponds as a symbolic process” (Sex reinvented by gender). Gender is therefore an active psychic construction, a way of exploring and transforming the sexual from a clinical perspective.
Two main hypotheses and interpretations form the axes of this clinical research:
1 – Gender appears as an effect of the bodies of knowledge about the sexual put into circulation by psychoanalysis.
2 – The trans opportunity/necessity (and its current unfolding) appears as an effect of the elucidation of sexuated logics (and not only sexual ones), leading our experience of the Phallus from the object to the signified by way of the signifier.
The results of this research are characterised (in broad strokes) by:
1 – the possibility of welcoming gender as a new theoretical element, whose definitions (literal and Borromean) and uses (clinical and conceptual) make it possible to shed light on the conditions of the subject of the unconscious choosing sex (chosen for lack of being decided).
2 – a supplement to Sexual Theory by interpreting a-sexuation, arising from an exploration of the dextrogyre side of the Borromean knot, giving birth to four other discourses (trans, ecologist, feminist and identitarian).
3 – the delineation of two fantasies, the heteros-patriarch fantasy and the a-patride, enabling another critique of patriarchy (as perversion) under the assaults of a contemporary perversion of the phallic aimed at its cultural transformation, and the elucidation of a possible supplement to ordinary paternal perversion, or perversion of the Phallus (better known as patriarchy), with the perversion of the phallic now at work among dissidences from phallogocentrism vectored by Trans Discourse (opening onto other sexuations through the opening of a-sexuation).
In January 2025, following an attempt at conversations on the unconscious, the social bond and sexuations, it became necessary to close this cycle of research on the gender clinic in psychoanalysis at the moment of moving more firmly towards its transmission. This was due to the state of the psychoanalytic milieu (having moved from ignorance to an offensive on these questions, in disregard of any ethics), distinct from psychoanalysis itself, which is in far better health than the milieu and is produced and transmitted outside the doxa.
Several publications are available, in which the entirety of this research is recorded; they bring together all the explorations and theoretical and clinical proposals related to the “gender” event within the psychoanalytic enterprise. A series of tables, graphs and attempts at schematisation are also available.
On the programme, among other things, a few notions, including these, listed only very partially:
- emergences of gender in the clinic
- topical, dynamic and economic mapping of gender
- psychoanalytic definitions of gender
- sexual aporias (sex, sexuality) of psychoanalysis
- transition through sex/through gender
- a third sex
- non-relativity of constitutive psychic bisexuality
- sexual identities, identities of alienation/separation, identity of transition
- identity, identification, identitarian
- senseless sexual orientation
- sexual norms, social norms/landscape of sexuation, social landscape
- raw writings, inclusive writing, epicene language
- Borromean mapping of gender, sex and the field of identity
- fantasy a-patride, heteros-patriarch fantasy and capitalist discourse
- aa-sexuation
- signifier versus performative
- creation of new sex, choice of sex, decision of sex
- writings of the sexes, writings of the symptom
Undoing one’s gender: what is there to say? (2009)
The queer experience and the uncanny (2010)
Gender in psychoanalysis: the return of the critique of knowledge (2014)
Current relevance of the Freudian “bedrock”: the first “pregnant” man (2014)
Emergence and handling of gender in the clinic, from substance to object (2014)
The “gay gender” and identitarian suffering: the slam phenomenon (2014)
Gender in psychoanalysis: perimeter of the definition (2014)
Anatomy and destiny of gender in Freud and some contemporaries (2015)
Humanity needs the wanderings of the sexes and the meanderings of genders (2016)
Identity is not an answer to our existential doubts (2016)
How transgender children will change adults’ language (2017)
Sexuality, this unthought for psychoanalysis (which should remain so) (2020)
a-sexuation: perversion of the phallic and the function of castration (2021)
Transgender children: hopes for civilisation (2021)
“Psychoanalysis”, “Child”, “Transgender”: these are only signifiers (2022)
Letter to a present-day psychoanalyst (2022).
If Woman does not exist, Dick does not either (2022).
Sexuation, the stakes of the phallic and gender (2022).
The unconscious is not bisexual; it is bisexuality (2022).
Smoking the Phallus with a peace pipe (2023).
Psychoanalytic rock-paper-scissors, Trans Discourse and Sexuations (2023).
Show me your dormitory and I will tell you who you are (2023).
The Ones against the Others (2024).
Conversation with the empty place (2024).
Supplement to Sexual Theory (1): a-sexuation (2024).
Conversation with identity, the identitarian and identification (2024).
Sex reinvented by gender, a psychoanalytic construction (2016), volume 1 of the Gender Clinic in Psychoanalysis.
Speak to my body, novel (2023).
From gender to a-sexuation, a psychoanalytic interpretation (2026), volume 2 of the Gender Clinic in Psychoanalysis.
Definition of gender in psychoanalysis (2013)
Gender is the limit situated both outside and inside sex, the shoreline or margin of sex capable of revealing its depth of field. Gender appears under the effect of the sexual; it questions the unconscious knowledges of sexual difference, and makes identifications waver until they are renewed. Thus, gender undoes sex and creates sex in the in-between of its intermittent disturbance, at the instant of stability in which it is felt.
Sex reinvented by gender, a psychoanalytic construction, Eres, 2016.
Mapping of gender, sex, sexuation (2013)
Sex reinvented by gender, a psychoanalytic construction, Eres, 2016.
Borromean mapping of sex, gender and sexuation on the Borromean knot (levogyre) (2016)
Sex reinvented by gender, a psychoanalytic construction, Eres, 2016.
Mapping of the identitarian, identity, identification (2018)
Unpublished, lecture at Cerisy for the symposium around the work of Laurence Khan.
Mapping of three jouissances (2020)
“A-sexuation: perversion of the phallic and the function of castration”, September 2021.
Proposed reading of the formulas of sexuation, or Formulas of a-sexuation (2021)
Adding a punch between S and the object a
Brothers of souls, or The Community surpassed, L’un·e, 2021.
Borromean mapping of sex, gender, object a; of identification, identity and the identitarian; as well as three jouissances, on the knot (dextrogyre) (2021)
“A-sexuation: perversion of the phallic and the function of castration”, September 2021.
Course of the treatment (starting from gender… and not only), in a three-dimensional perspective (2021)
1 – First movement — S/R: from the subject supposed to know to the real unconscious
2 – Second movement — R/I: from the real unconscious to the specular imaginary
3 – Third movement — I/S: from the non-specular imaginary to the subject supposed to know
“A-sexuation: perversion of the phallic and the function of castration ”, September 2021.
From “2” make a little more (or much better)
NB: Several responses to this table have highlighted the binarist concern of a two-column presentation. This is a huge problem for reading and for the effects of that reading. On this point, in order to draw on knowledge arising from analytic experience, I therefore add this remark on binarism as a binocular symptom of us bipeds with two eyes on our face: The gaze (which is not the eye that sees) has the capacity to reduce (through disavowal) the gap between seeing and what is seen. This has consequences. In reality, this disavowed gap returns where it bursts upon bodies, dissolves neighbourhood, junction, the inherent confusion) for those who present themselves to the eye burdened (despite itself) with separating them, distinguishing them, with “ secare (etymology of sex, in the sense of separating). This is why it is so difficult—almost inevitable—to misread a two-column table that we approach irrepressibly from this side of reality that despises the unreal to the point of making us forget that what is written in one column and what is written in the other were written with the same ink.“
“ Smoking the Phallus with a peace pipe, or Psychoanalysis: a sororal symptom ”, October 2023.“
Mapping of sex, gender, sexuation, Phallus and object a (2023)
“ Rock-paper-scissors, Trans Discourse and Sexuations ”, November 2023.“
Trans Discourse and formulas of a-sexuation (2023)
“ Rock-paper-scissors, Trans Discourse and Sexuations ”, November 2023.“
The sexed being, while authorizing themselves only from themselves, is not without authorizing themselves from certain others.
“The Ones against the Others ”, April 2024.
Four discourses, from the dextrogyre side of the Borromean knot (2024).
© A complete bibliography (around 300 references), indicative in the fields of psychoanalysis, sociology, philosophy, queer studies, feminisms, anthropology, history, politics, gender studies, etc., excluding literature.
© A selected bibliography (around 50 references) on psychoanalysis works useful for this clinic.
