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This book is a collection of essays in which gender theory and lived experience inseparably and unavoidably give rise to one another as in a Möbius strip. It is part of a growing intellectual movement in psychoanalysis,
cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy that breaks down the dualistic splits between the mind and the body, the intrapsychic, and the social and instead examines their interrelatedness (Kyselo 2014; Stolorow 2013; Thompson and Varela 2001). The authors use psychoanalytic theory, twisting it to face and query itself, to generate what psychoanalytic theory has the potential to become when not subsumed by dominant cultural narratives: to free its subjects to invent themselves, to allow for autopoiesis.
The story began with Drs. Saketopoulou and Pellegrini's paper “A Feminine Boy: Trauma as a Source of Self-Theorizing” winning the first Tiresias Award, an award founded by the newly established Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee of the International Psychoanalytical Association. This award was supposed to come with a path to publication, however it was censored because of the authors’ acknowledgments: “this project insists on welcoming ‘queer’ subjects (patients as well as candidates and analysts) who have too often been treated as problems for psychoanalysts rather than as opportunities to think our metapsychology anew” (p. xi). This statement and others like it were deemed “too political.” This book represents the authors’ way of making meaning of these events, making sense of what happened when they voiced a wish to do more than change metapsychology, to welcome queer subjects into psychanalysis, and take accountability for the real damage to queer people inflicted by our field throughout history.
The Tiresias Award was named after the Greco-Roman myth of Tiresias, a myth which, lest gender polymorphism be deemed a modern phenomenon, recounts the story of Tiresias’ transition from a man to a woman and back to a man again. Tiresias became th