“Psychoanalyst,” “Child,” “Transgender”: These Are Merely Signifiers (2022)

“Psychoanalyst,” “Child,” “Transgender”: These are merely signifiers

 

Published online, February 2022.

Transgender Foreword

A few bits of chatter and repetition, one last time, centered not on a theme—gender (transgender)—but on the recurrence, the repetition of certain symptomatic productions in speech, through discourses, which we must attempt to push a little further to see if we are progressing in our research on the effects of this gender trouble at work (transgender).

The theme of “gender” is now a cluster, as it is useless to keep distinct certain questions that are intrinsically knotted: gender, psychoanalyst, social, unconscious, political.

A single method, always: to twist language in its discursive finery, using speech. And always resolutely in a form other than those termed academic or scientific.

By way of providing a final point, of beginning to elaborate it, for my theoretical propositions/trajectories on the clinical practice of gender in psychoanalysis, which have lasted nearly fifteen years; not for my psychoanalytic clinical practice, which simply continues.

 

Troubled gender, the persistence of the uncanny

I would like to begin with a remark concerning sports competitions, where the question of trans women is regularly raised in terms of the fairness of participation for competitors born male who, having become girls/women, may compete against other female competitors born female. Injustice, this problem, competitive equity that… Arguments and disputes are not lacking. A similar situation exists, for example, with the trans male wrestler in the United States whose birth certificate displays “female,” and who must therefore fight against women due to this legal status, against his choice. I am not interested in the necessity of the values of sports competitions nor their future, desirable evolution in society. I only wish to note that all opinions or arguments run in every direction, from all sides, without ever really noting that our habits of sports competition have never targeted men or women, but rather pit the males and females of our human species against each other in these biologist competitions today, even if it means downplaying their unavoidable status as speaking beings. We shall not foolishly reproach our ancestors for this, but let us say that time has passed, which must be taken into account.

Another example: the release of the film Little Girl in 2020, and the reactions from the world of psychoanalysts, which must undoubtedly be distinguished from that of psychoanalysis as a field of thought and practice. The response was not uniform, but a majority made heard their dread, consternation, and panic regarding the film’s content. Mission accomplished from that perspective for director Sébastien Lifshitz. Unfortunately, we cannot say the same for the psychoanalyst viewers who often, sadly, spoke out to spread their wild interpretations, or the marks of their fascinations reactivated by the real of sex at stake in these questions, far from the conditions conducive to elaboration, and ultimately on the same narrow model as the scientist discourse that descends upon these offspring, like the plague on the lower clergy, pinning diagnoses on them where there is no illness, but rather questions of the highest importance.

If gender fluidity—and what it reveals of sexual non-knowledge—were not the object of such great contempt or foolish disinterest from various quarters of society, and from certain psychoanalysts expressing themselves in the media in particular, it is highly likely that the stakes of sexual identity—whose quality as a fantasy, an “imaginary focus” (C. Lévi-Strauss), everyone so quickly forgets—would not have to become encysted in forms of sexualities (“sexual orientations,” “sexual practices,” etc.), or identity artifacts so radical in their conscious determinations (“Gender Dysphoria,” “Transgender,” “Psychoanalyst,” etc.) crushing the unconscious stakes that these reactions dangerously prevent from blossoming and/or emerging.

For the stake here is indeed to rely on this already repeated observation: from the experience of psychoanalysis, we have not yet been able to define what sex is, nor gender, nor sexuality, nor sexual orientation, or identity, as opposed to having been able to say a little about what the sexual or sexuation is, identification, identity, fantasy, desire, and its interpretation… So much for the observation. For the possible opening, I continue to think that so-called gender questions are an invitation to start a number of things from scratch, as with every anthropological tremor likely to make us progress collectively, where gender presents an effect of knowledge on the sexual such as psychoanalysis has put into circulation beyond the cures, not without effects of transference.

In view of the reactions of certain psychoanalysts (via the internet, press columns, etc.), or even psychoanalytic institutions, toward “so-called gender questions,” I maintain my interpretation: that there is an ordeal of castration here, which imposes itself on everyone—in this time of slow but progressive deconstruction of patriarchy alongside the decline of the paternal function—to which, as we know from analytic experience, a “saying no to castration” or a “refusal of castration” may be opposed. In other words, all of us, differently situated in the sexual landscape of our humanity, must not shrink from this sexual transition of psychoanalysis and the world in which it emerged, lest we risk the most useless, least creative perversions that may appear on this occasion.

Thus, I repeat, and progress a tiny bit from time to time, with what my experience of psychoanalysis teaches me, thanks to those who come to speak, to attempt to speak so as not to disavow what speaking is.

For I maintain that, on the side of transgender children, we are witnessing much more of a saying ‘no’ to castration, likely to constitute a happy support for the subject and the humanization of the individual, as distinct from its refusal—as is often proposed as an interpretation of this “phenomenon” of “transgender children,” even more current today than yesterday—to which is attributed the task of establishing perverse processes. And I am speaking of the children, not the adults who care for or examine their cases, namely parents, but also psychoanalysts, educators, teachers, doctors, endocrinologists, activists, etc., in whom the specter of refusal is very clearly present. By dint of being denounced on either side of the median line that traverses it, although apparently opposed on an ideological level, for example, they are often not very different in establishing authentically perverse positions, trickling down from one generation to the next. A perversity that I hold to be the result of a handling of the symptom as a call to the Other, by some of our colleagues—parents too—or an abusive interpretation of the symptom outside of transference, no doubt to avoid recognizing that very place where the cure, conducted to the fringe of the infinite upon the finite, reveals its nature: it is jouissance (J. Lacan, seminar on Anxiety).

For yes, children continue to be fashioned with the “regrets” of their parents, even if it means becoming “monsters” according to the famous and biting quote by J.-P. Sartre, to which we may add that this monstrosity has nothing to do with Halloween, but rather constitutes that which is most freak, that which causes horror at the heart of being, always. This is enough to interest psychoanalysts in listening and agreeing to call psychoanalysis into question by reinventing it, again and again, despite the terrifying tremors and instabilities that our condition as proletarians of the real (J. Lacan) offers us for existence.

 

Who would want to abandon betting on the subject within each person?

This being said, there is nonetheless a crude, even simplistic interpretation that nevertheless deserves to be posed to establish a (temporary) point in the field of the opening currently occurring in our experience (if we admit that experience is an opening of which we know only the edges).

Released or abandoned, let go or freed from the verticality that formerly predominated in the inscription, for the subject, of phallic stakes, today’s subjects testify to a new modality of inscription of these stakes where horizontality prevails in certain respects. What does this mean? It means, among other things, that the processes of socialization and humanization (referring to the distinction proposed by J-P. Lebrun) within the group, the community, etc., take precedence over those of the family, with parents or guardians, with previous generations, etc. This is the mark of the openings achieved previously, which allowed for an exit from certain enclaves where freedoms were reduced and discriminations perpetuated by tradition (the progressive deconstruction of patriarchy, which is far from complete; feminism, psychoanalysis, etc.).

It is not surprising, in this context, that there are more children than in the past requesting to construct themselves otherwise than through the automatism/tradition of past transmission, preferring a more personal determination, nourished by observations and unconscious determinants. This allows them to escape, for example, the unenviable or even threatening role and function, in certain situations, of “Woman does not exist” (J. Lacan), or, another example, to conquer a femininity—always performative, a masquerade (it is not the feminine)—yet lightened of the weight of the remains of the verticality of yesteryear (whose effects are all felt and at work) which largely condemned them to an eternal comparison with the virilist ideal of authority of the father of the horde, if they accept too readily to embody the “daddy’s boy” (or mommy’s).

Especially since the ongoing modifications in the relationship between the signifier and the performative, where the latter continues to nibble away at a signifying portion of the former, are still not the subject of serious study in the psychoanalytic world—the only study capable of enlightening us on the new modalities of knotting and confrontation between the subject and the social, without needing to prefer simple contestation of societal phenomena (as if they were assimilable).

Thus, male babies and other female babies will prefer, as subjects, to make heard and construct their interpretation of their possible place in today’s sexual landscape, starting from the opening produced little by little, which they can make use of better than their elders, not without being traversed (adhering or opposing) by the fantasies and desires of their parents, for example—thus of the previous generation, itself traversed by what its own elders transmitted before it, and so on, just as the human species continues to perpetuate itself by moving ever further away from reproduction, and this for a long time now, since it dates back to the moment of transition from sexual reproduction to procreation.

 

Transgender children speak

When a child speaks to say that they are a girl or that they are a boy, with a body that is not anatomically constituted in accordance with the majority standards linking the male to the future man and the female to the future woman, they are not saying that nature made a mistake. No. They are saying that humanity continues to evolve. A humanity that is not constructed or understood with the established knowledge predominant in our libraries, but with that which is still poorly known and will complete it tomorrow. They are saying that they are a man or a woman or neither, or another formulation still, as a subject. It is the subject who comes to say what they think are their coordinates in the sexual landscape; a subject more strongly determined than three generations ago by their individual dimension—that of the individual who can be part of a group or a community—than by their dimension as the son/daughter of their father, an artifact of the Father, within their family, an artifact of the horde, as was the case very predominantly, if not exclusively, until recently.

Let us note, if necessary, that they do not say this lightheartedly. They suffer for it! These children, more or less young, and their families may well rely on a supposed error of nature or a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, not necessarily to adhere to a new religion (psychoanalysts bear a very great responsibility here), but because one must rely on something, particularly when the discipline and experience of psychoanalysts seem no longer to provide perspectives for new knowledge to be constructed, capable of shedding a little more light on this enigma of the sexual (since psychoanalysts mostly make heard sentences, accusations, or moral judgments).

Let us observe, in this regard, that these children testify very clearly to a new capacity of which we cannot immediately be certain they master the use and effect. But it is an authentic capacity, which carries a wandering truth concerning this sexual which continues, as we have said since Freud, to traumatize, to breach the being and the subject of the unconscious. Therefore, we must welcome it in this way if we claim our analytic act as necessary for the treatment and transformation of psychic formations.

On the side, if I may say so, of the parents or doctors accompanying these paths, educating these children, we cannot hold the same discourse, for there the contradictions that societal evolutions have sometimes been quick to consecrate with the support of somewhat weak, if not trivial, causes are more harshly agitated than in these young people! (the career of diagnoses such as dysphoria, for example). Clinging to the most imaginary part of past theorizations and understandings, the interpretations/solutions that are voiced float in the void of a discourse that is almost always too superimposed, which can only cause concern about the force of inertia hidden at the heart of their apparent benevolent voluntary declarations, mixed with protocols where the subject is not taken into consideration in favor of the individual (small “i”)—not the Individual, the one who dies to the Community (Blanchot, Nancy, Bataille, Duras), but the individual who would triumph over it as is expected in times of generalized disavowal with the encouragement of politics subjected to liberalism (therein lies the ideology).

 

New psychoanalytic knowledge, provided we do not shrink back

Evidently, psychoanalysis in experience must be able to say and make heard what it learns from these subjects who say something very precious. Certainly, this new knowledge, these new subjects or subjects of today may seem incompatible with the values of their parents or grandparents; they may even cause fear or dread of the worst. It is well known: the end of the world is always for tomorrow, even if it is drawing closer. The fact remains that they are saving their own skin, and also those of their parents or grandparents depending on the situation—their skin as subjects undermined or put to work by their individual dimension more strongly than had been possible to live fully in post-modernity and its effects until now.

But if psychoanalysis prefers to voice its lamentations over the decline of this or the catastrophe of that, it might as well prefer to remain silent, for that is not how one accounts for psychic suffering, nor even claims to offer the subject the conditions for the advent of their speech to the point where their unconscious determinants appear manageable (a possible goal of analysis).

What I am sure of is that the psychoanalysis of today will survive its pitfalls and overcome its legitimate fears through its own progress, provided, always, that it does not shrink from what of the real presents itself at the limit where the symbolic deserves, and can, be treated.

For by taking an interest in it, with the caution and rigor that our continuing analytic experience deserves, the transgender/sex fact instructs us on the current modalities of sexuation alongside which we say that a-sexuation has come, as if to complete the picture or clarify it, opening up to a few additional markers of what, for example, the function of castration is becoming (see propositions on the dextrorotatory Borromean knot to locate other registers—identity, sexual jouissance, etc.—in “a-sexuation: perversion of the phallic…”). This is even before the sexuation formulated by Lacan has been fully read or used for happy ends for the Freudian cause. Time moves faster than before, they say.

Too bad for those—who are not only the grandfathers or grandmothers of psychoanalysis or of these transgender children, since they sometimes share a generational identity—fiercely leaning on the counters of their chipped interpretations (which must indeed be noted as such before creating new ones); it is only one by one that an additional turn can make known what is lacking in the knowledge of some, if they advance in a group or by the force of an authoritarian identification with the ideology of tradition or their science: they are mistaken and refuse to continue enlightening this experience of speaking-beings that overwhelms us quite often, let us admit.

In the singular dimension, all of this requires, again one by one, to be specified in the cure. Since each person has their own reasons, incomparable and indisputable by another, except by the analyst who will ensure not only their function as a semblance of the object a, but also that of a semblance of the a/Other of the sexual, at least for the moment; we shall see in ten or forty years what will need to be specified further. For they are not only in the place of a or A, as psychotic transference has taught us in relation to neurosis, in particular, but in the function of other, where the other oscillates between the small and the big, namely of the sexual— a/Other of the sexual. Another way of translating the possible creation of the new sex that I was able to develop further in The Reinvented Sex… concerning constructions in the analysis possible from the clinical practice of gender.

If psychoanalysts renounce the hospitable ethics that otherwise suits them so well, then these children, these hopes of civilization , will have only the brutality of collective confrontation as a response, which no longer promises a common (the very thing they denounce through their sexual sayings, through their requests for transition), as is the case with the crumbling of the social bond in times of aggressive liberalism, as society suffers it, and as psychoanalytic societies and schools suffer from it by pretending to believe that the life-buoy-institutionalization of the aftermath of Lacan’s death to which they dedicated themselves could save them, even if it means confusing filiation, transmission, and heritage, without realizing that this same symptom is at the heart of the psychic stakes of these children: what internal/external knotting today? Is it still that one begins at the heart of the other? What of the Lacanian extimate now? What is transmitted, if it is no longer the inscription of phallic stakes, perhaps that of conformism to the object?

For it is quite obvious that this common point of a risk of ideological grip, so easily identified in subjects very much affected by the effects of liberal and scientist discourse, is not very different from the recitation of mantras “in the style of” (a consecrated expression today) parrot-like braying, where the formations of the unconscious end up as end-caps in the supermarkets of the cause, from which psychoanalysis suffered after Freud, and from which it suffers just as cruelly after Lacan (his disappearance, that is). The Phallus-bearers, as I like to call them, of All-Psychoanalysis, may well fear, in every possible magazine and symposium, that certain current discourses encourage closures and serious harm to the subject; the very milieu of psychoanalysts is absolutely not immune to this, and has worked in this direction since the beginning of the Freudian discovery: proletarian of the real for Lacan, community of speaking-beings… but are we not interested in knowing a little more about this a-patriated fantasy newly appeared alongside the hetero-patriarchal fantasy ?

Transgender children, let us be very clear, suffer from the same thing: the same piece of The Thing at the heart of the torments of psychoanalysis against its own transmission by analysts themselves. Whether this can be approached through the pass, the dubbing, or otherwise, leads to this single conclusion: a community of structure from which no one can be released or labeled with titles of pathologies, in the social or political space, whatever they may be. And what is it about? Manifestly this thing renamed the thing by Duras when she seems to confuse the object a and the Phallus (Gaipied magazine interview, November 1980)—but not so much, upon re-reading it in hindsight. Otherwise, do we choose the interpretation of the symptom outside of transference? And by that very act, do we declare the end of our claim to the analytic act?

Yes, the Phallus is affected by a process with perverse effects that phallic stakes share with the object a when they are confused, sometimes through poetry, sometimes through identity acquisition. New filiations, requirements of transmission, creations of new sexes, etc., exist released from the habits of heritage and are the only possible paths to take to get out of the rut where the evolution of humanity is not bound to abandon us as if in the ditch of liberal waste, but can, perhaps, support us in our effort to hold analytic requirements to their maximum, as far as possible from our narcissistic, collective, and political wounds that make us say identity-based nonsense (especially when identity-based is confused with identity), and whose shedding would be better directed toward a welcoming couch.

 

Hoping, together

Not to let our dear little ones only become ultra-moderns, and/or ourselves along with them, since even Netflix alerts us to the countless disaster scenarios where dystopias crucify the heteronomy of the world before, to leave that of tomorrow without hope—hope is nonetheless a basal alterity, thanks to the happy negativity by which it is sustained.

Not to leave the Freudian sexual forbidden from sexual transition (“sexual” also understood) through the continuing analytic experience, since we know that a cure conducted to its end pertains to this sort of result beyond fantasy, with full knowledge of the facts, supported by interpreted desire and despite the jouissance of the symptom, etc., and to account for the deformations of the psychoanalyst as the beyond of the formations of the psychoanalyst. The formations of the psychoanalyst do not go without their beyond: the deformations of the same.