Mutatis Mutandis (2023)

Mutatis Mutandis

A greeting card to a few panicked people

& Invitation to all and everyone else

 

Published online, January 2023.

We are witnessing an epidemic wave of criticism, a groundswell against gender clinic practice. “Trans issues,” as a segment of gender issues, are prompting an unprecedented production of reactions—more rarely, elaborations—from the psychoanalytic milieu. So here is a list of remarks and questions addressed to a few panicked people… psychoanalysts or affiliates, scholars of the unconscious, speaking loudly about “the ongoing trans peril,” “the transgender epidemic,” or the “manufacture of the transgender child.”

 

What have you been doing over the last forty years? You who, all of a sudden, have recently begun to speak out to denounce risks, dead ends, and dangers related to sex/gender transitions in adults, but above all in minors—and to denounce, sometimes insult, the work of your colleagues engaged in this clinic far less noisily than you, whom you sometimes label “trans-affirmative.”

This is how, at this end of year, a series of remarks and questions comes to me—so as to respond to you in a certain way, and also to indicate that we did not wait for you to get to work, seriously, in keeping with psychoanalytic ethics—resolved to welcome those for whom speaking becomes necessary in order to shed light on desire (whose ambivalence is not so easily ruled out, as many critics claim), to interpret the psychic movements at work, to identify what needs repairing, and what must also be created in order to move toward possibilities for living.

 

Opponents of what is wrongly named—by yourselves—trans activism (a way of denying the clinic as it is unfolding and making it look like an ideological battle), you who seem, from your reactions and comments, to think that this is an identity-expression movement duped by the fantasmatic “true sex,” the pursuit of which is pointless (certainly, but remains an ongoing concern for all subjects throughout life), held responsible for this questioning of sexed bodies and genderofsexes (Geschlecht) with which subjects cannot avoid having to situate themselves, like everyone else, in the sexual landscape—(trans activism) supported by a lack of knowledge about the sexual, that which stems from psychoanalytic experience, notably regarding the unconscious logics at work in matters of sexuation—explain this to me:

How is it that all these people engaged in transitions have passed over this prodigious contribution of Psychoanalysis on the sexual, to the point of being unable to take hold of it—especially over the last 20 years, in which the “phenomenon” has intensified—and of choosing another path than transition, than medical modifications of bodies and physiologies (which you call mutilations)?

How have they—trans children and trans adults concerned—not known how to rely on this century-plus legacy, whose superior expertise you seem, with strength and courage, determined to reaffirm, only to wallow in the “fashion” of discourses available on social networks, in contempt of your “true knowledge” that serves you as sex?

What do these trans people refuse? The hesitant truth of sex in the speaking-being? Psychoanalysis itself as a learned authority (not the act of going to speak with an analyst, which is also happening at the same time for some)?

Explain to me what this “refusal of ambivalence” of desire is, and this “interpretation” of the trans phenomenon by trans people themselves. I do not understand, because it is never what I encounter when I receive and welcome these analysands.

 

Because, seen from here, the agitations—no doubt understandable, perhaps even legitimate—on the part of those who denounce a risk linked to the trans claim itself deserve, in echo, another interpretation in the form of questions:

What have you done, and thought, these last forty years, since Lacan’s death, while psychoanalytic research on the many and plural sexual actualities has been ossifying, while the patients concerned are mistreated by medical discourse and medical practices as well, by social discourse, by the Law?

Where were you while sexual identities were perceived in their full extent, since the emergence of struggles for the rights of homosexual people, then trans people, not forgetting intersex people relegated to remain in the blind spot of your thoughts and proposals?

What have you interpreted, to date, from the barely emerging lessons of what the HIV/AIDS epidemic has generated, without our having truly begun to extract its treasures? … Were you not, for a great many of you, lagging behind in the face of these impacts of the Real, where our knowledge, our bearings of the Symbolic order, were driven out of the field of acceptable reality by thousands of subjects confronted with the shutting-out of their contemporaries? For yes, if there is an “epidemic” that can begin to teach us, it is not that of the trans “phenomenon,” but indeed that of HIV/AIDS, whose repercussions are expressed in sexual actualities—particularly those linked to transitions, but also to chemsex: we will have to begin to admit it and to study it further. Viruses impact identities by altering the status of the identitary, revealed in its nature as trauma; identities collide: the gay exceeds the homosexual, stripping it of its perversion to cast it, alas, to the winds, and replacing it with the belief in passage to the act, where the Act is no longer recognized; the trans emerges and meets a subjective necessity, the trauma is modified, the subject’s orientations in the structure as well. We have so much to learn from this.

And to add, and to question, what you put forward when you set out your clinical-theoretical reflections under the banner of a demagogic rhetoric that leads J.-A. Miller, for example—though he is not the only one—to say that trans people, after all, may perhaps have no unconscious (latest publication by the ECF, The trans solution, at Navarin); that psychoanalysts, with these patients, are reduced to the simple role of “therapists,” unable to venture forward as usual with their knowledge of the unconscious, nor to steer treatments with ease, in your perspective that seems to hope for nothing but the neurotic-Oedipal regulation of the masses? (see the clinical discussions in that same work, to appreciate Theory when it forgets its nature as fiction); that there would be no psychoanalytic epistemology other than the “two sexes” underlined by Lacan, to which some are willing to entrust the outgrowth of the “neither-nor” as a makeshift perch, so as to confirm the anteriority and supremacy of the supposed first “two,” while daily clinical practice relies on quite other things?

What is triggering this panic recently, while for nearly 50 years trans people have remained targets of exclusion, murder, and denigration?

Where have you been all this time while many psychoanalysts, and other necessary clinicians (medicine, social and political sciences, culture), have been working to establish their scientific research and theoretical elaborations, to support theses, to open consultation settings, to write articles and books, to run seminars, to collaborate with willing and motivated professionals?

Have you read what we have produced as work?

Have you asked those who are engaged with these questions and who welcome people, day after day—far longer than you have been worrying about it in the media and intellectually?

 

It seems not; so we must start again from the beginning…

 

Because, be assured, everything we have learned would reassure you on many points, had you taken the time to consult us, to read our work, to question us, instead of acting as though, by speaking out on these questions, you were present at the inauguration of a reflection on a phenomenon difficult to grasp, of which you would be the official experts.

 

1. You might know that, yes, the logic of sexuation—first and foremost a writing, before it is a reading—brought to light in Lacan’s time still holds, but its use and its reading have changed under the effect of sexual actualities by which we take the measure of the Actual, of effects of knowledge, where the Real compels a treatment of the Symbolic—and not that odious covering-over of the Real by the Symbolic that prevents it, which you illustrate in your tremors.
2. You would know that Psychoanalysis bears a leading responsibility in this emergence of gender and its related questions, since it has set into circulation forms of knowledge about the sexual, which produce, in all directions, transference effects outside the cure—where gender appears, very clearly, as a saving means of dealing with the supposed knowledge from which the subject suffers before finding some way out, by constructing new solutions—failing cures, with cures.
3. You could correct your pedagogies—necessary though they are—for transmitting psychoanalytic knowledge, and cease presenting the not-all phallic as the reverse of an imaginary all-phallic, where it is only useful to think it as its incision, not its opposite.
4. You would know that, yes, the Phallus, in the logic of sexuation, has in certain instances been outmaneuvered in favor of object a, thus opening onto a sexuation operating outside-Phallus (but not beyond the Phallus), and that this has consequences for the possibility of hearing and interpreting—detached from habits previously acquired—what presents itself and what is said.
5. You might know what a-sexuation—new perversion (at last!) of the phallic—invites us to explore beyond the first elaborations of the field of Borromean clinic practice, in order to think the subjective articulations made possible today, not under the influence of technical progress and the offerings of science, which nonetheless matter, but much further than our acquis, toward the unheard-of and the still unthought that comes to us (the unconscious was not sutured by Lacan, as far as I know).
6. You might know that sexual orientation still makes no sense.
7. You would know how to appreciate the subtleties of the transitions of the fantasy of sexual identity, partially released from its hetero-patriarchal aim under the effect of an extension of a fantasy a-patriate, of which it remains to be said what it is, what it prevents, and what it allows.
8. You would know that the identitary, the stuff of trauma, is not—in reality—identity, nor even the meaning of movements to be repressed as misunderstood narcissistic claims from a sociological point of view to which we may oppose an ethical reservation. Rather, it remains that which is refused, through which identity is forged by no longer knowing it, though oriented by it—where it intersects, not at a distance, phallic jouissance as it is founded on articulating, to the invisible for the subject, what in the mouth of the individual is chewed over and ruminated as the advanced point of an object to defend and to fear.
9. You might know the contemporary situation of the subject who can choose their sex for lack of deciding it—a decision that would belong to the field of the individual, where the impact of the social, in which beings move, is subjectivized as collective.
10. You might know that sex transitions and gender transitions are distinct, and that this opens onto necessary research that would greatly interest you.
11. You might know that transitions are never ends in themselves, but necessary means whose nuances, opportunities, and dead ends we can appreciate.
12. You could have a better grasp of what you are speaking about—decisive, yet fragmentary—in your diatribes filled with parables, juxtapositions, hypotyposes, and synecdoches (see in particular The manufacture of the transgender child, C. Eliacheff, C. Masson, L’Observatoire).
13. You could already take part in our work of theoretical elaboration aimed at advancing psychoanalytic theories, to assume and support the future of a Psychoanalysis less frightened by the tremors of the present, and instead happy and enthusiastic before the promise of its own ongoing transition.
14. You would know that, in listening to disturbances and questionings, the solutions envisaged for a time often persist only on certain occasions—ultimately rare, as we observe with many other difficulties in living that we receive—provided we truly welcome them, without bellowing at the top of our lungs or shrinking back from what experience presents to us.
15. You would help us to take up again what, in Freud and Lacan, deserves to be taken up, modified, extended. And you could conduct psychoanalytic treatments, as analysts, toward the interpretations and constructions we know to be possible.
16. You could debate this: an analytic cure is necessarily a sex/gender transition—as symptom, as agent or factor—this transition is unavoidable for a cure carried through to its end. Otherwise there would only be identification with the sex/gender/x of the analyst in the place of the symptom; identification with the symptom at the end of a cure that has not finished saying what it swallows instead of producing it. Transitions can modify sexuation, but above all they very often set it in motion—not by cutting into it where there was nothing (no sexuation), but by clarifying the terms of a sexuation that remained unfinished, not practicable enough, dangerous… for the subject—provided one does not refuse, nor recoil, before the nascent modalities of logical articulations under the effect of the Actual.

 

It would be surprising if psychoanalytic theory could not bear being taken further in the exploration of continents that have remained dark in every era when certain advances become discernible—never finished.

Since we will not escape this challenge—otherwise Psychoanalysis will quietly disappear by no longer operating where the sexual is lodged, in its era—by modifying what needed to be modified, in order to exist, in order to hold, perhaps you could get to work. I say it with pretension and cheek, exaggeration and crudeness: be assured that you do real harm to the minimal considerations from which subjects should be able to benefit in this troubled era.

 

Come on—take heart. What must be changed can be changed; 2023 can continue to open onto the Mutatis Mutandis of 21st-century Psychoanalysis. Perhaps we should open a new space for clinical research and psychoanalytic theoretical elaborations, to see whether something is possible outside institutional stakes (university, political, or scholarly), career and/or study and training ambitions, or yet other limitations linked to the exercise of power that make the transmission of Psychoanalysis a matter of inheritance and faith—a space for practitioners of Psychoanalysis, then: analysands and analysts: all engaged in the analytic experience.

 

Happy New Year to all and everyone else.

 

Vincent Bourseul,

(thinking of a few others with whom the work is possible).