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As an analyst I approach my task with the hope that whatever else the patient may take away from the experience of the analytic encounter he will at the very least understand experientially how present-day actions, thoughts, phantasies and wishes reveal a lifetime of experience that ‘burns’ through to the present – an image that was beautifully captured by T. S. Eliot in East Cocker. As analysts we are always witnessing or participating in, and thus hopefully facilitating, our patients’ relationship to time past, present and future in order to help them to live in time.
Many psychopathologies have been conceptualized as reflecting ‘problems to do with time and accepting change’ (Birksted-Breen, 2009: 39). Some patients find it difficult to be in the present because they are stuck in the past; others, by contrast, struggle to remain connected with the past and are suspended in a so-called present that is effectively atemporal, that is, ‘out of time’.
Living in time requires acceptance not only of change but also of continuity, that is, acceptance of what cannot be changed even with the passing of time (Boris, 1987, 1994). Nowhere is this challenge more painfully apparent than in the case of transsexual individuals who need to find a way of accepting the fact of having being born in a given body that is then felt to be odds with their subjective experience and is later altered through sex reassignment surgery (SRS).
In this chapter I will focus on the double meaning of ‘given’ body, that is both as the sexed body we are born into and the body ‘given’ to us de facto by our parents linking us indelibly to them irrespective of any changes we subsequently make to the given body. I want to examine the impact of extensive modification of the body on the ‘temporal link’ (Grinberg and Grinberg, 1981), which is an important feature of our identity as it provides continuity between different representations of the self over time.
I am focusing here on a subset of transsexual patien