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I find the introduction by Raphael Blass and the discussion between David Bell and Avgi Saketopoulou very interesting (see International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 101, 1014-1039, ). First, Bell opens his presentation with a maxim from Wilhelm Reich’s writing: Every social order creates those character forms which it needs for its own preservation … The character structure … is the crystallization of the sociological process of a given epoch. Bell does not say explicitly what he means by this citation, nor does he clarify the context in which Reich applies this maxim.
One will find these sentences in the first preface to his book Character Analysis from 1933 (Anthi, 2020). But I think the basic premises for this maxim were laid in his book Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, also from 1933. This represented the first sociological study founded on psychoanalytic theory. I would appreciate it if Bell would explain his reasons for giving prominence to Reich’s original observations of how a ruling political regime in a given society could be preserved by cultivating specific social structures and character types, and thus, for example, maintain an authoritarian regime. In my opinion, Bell’s sociological considerations should be supplied by Bauman (2000) and his sociological theories about the modern (postmodern) society and its liquid forms where children and adolescents, to a greater extent than before, are left to themselves in a digitalized internet universe lacking normative frames and symbolically meaningful common structures. The circumstances while growing up are marked by unclear borders while the need for confirmation of one’s identity becomes importunate.
Although persons born as intersex are very rare, they can nevertheless demonstrate the significance of how psychoanalytic treatment can contribute to give them a more functional and usable identity related to how they feel regarding their gender. For many years ago I had in analysis an intersex patient.