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It has been clear for some time that the “transgender moment,” as it has been called by The New York Times, presents a problem for psychoanalysis. This is due in part to the compulsion among a certain contingent of Lacanian psychoanalysts and theorists to pathologize trans identities as fundamentally psychotic – as if neurosis is a legible text but psychosis can be addressed only with reparative intervention. In this way, this group has sidestepped the invaluable questions posed by the trans analysand and the generalizable implications those questions have for the metapsychology. Patricia Gherovici, a practicing psychoanalyst and the author of several books, including The Puerto Rican Syndrome (2003) and Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (2010), uses her practical experience working with trans individuals to bring a distinctly clinical orientation to her corrective investigation of transgenderism – and of gender in general – that a rigorously psychoanalytic orientation demands we make. Transgender Psychoanalysis is a useful tool for the psychoanalyst, the clinician, the theorist, the academic, the activist – in short, anyone who is concerned with addressing an underdeveloped, deeply necessary area of contemporary psychoanalysis. Although Gherovici moves quickly through some of Lacan’s most difficult texts, the author explains in lucid, informative prose many key concepts in the often obscure vocabulary of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The result is a text that significantly expands the current discourse in psychoanalytic and psychoanalytically inflected areas of critical theory and clinical praxis.
Gherovici begins Transgender Psychoanalysis by grounding the text in the unique situation of the present. “When I began working on transgender issues,” she writes, “I had not foreseen then that I would be riding a wave that has swept away everything else in pop culture’s imagination and also engulfed most psychiatri