Adolescent Ruthlessness and the Transitioning of the Analyst's Mind

Features of ruthlessness may come into play in the encounter between adolescents who come into the therapeutic space with clear and precise demands to be supported through their gender transition. Winnicott's concept of ruthlessness, extended from the infant-mother matrix to the emotional situation of the clinic, allows a consideration of the conditions under which the analyst can think about adolescent demands. These conditions involve the desire of both patient and analyst for certitude and the analyst's urgency to respond, as well as the adolescent's contradictory desires to both destroy and create gender. The work of Sally Swartz, who brought to Winnicott's conception a notion of ruthlessness in protest, helps us consider the qualities of ruthlessness in constituting gender. A snippet of work with a nonbinary patient shows how questions of gender cannot be understood apart from the intersubjective transferential field. Tying ruthlessness to the enigma of desire illuminates the emotional situation of the clinical encounter between the nonbinary or trans patient and the analyst, a situation that is also libidinal. An analytic move from the question of gender identity to the realm of an emotional situation allows the analyst to meet adolescent ruthlessness. This meeting is an ethical attempt to understand the other, but also reveals one's resistance to giving up something in order to understand.