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This issue argues that gender, in its many expressions, is not a static identity to be affirmed or a developmental error to be corrected. It is a movement – through language, body, memory, and relation – that both unsettle and extend psychoanalysis. We witness the analytic pair confronting questions that resist resolution: How does one stay present to dissociation without retraumatizing? How does one affirm without foreclosing? How do we navigate the tension between our theories and our patients’ lived needs and demands for recognition and survival?
These pieces do not offer singular answers but cultivate a shared ethic: to make room for gender not as a problem to be solved, but as a phenomenon that shapes – and is shaped by – the analytic encounter. They model a psychoanalysis that risks unknown territory that bears with the opacity of another’s becoming, and that registers the social and historical forces that live in our consulting rooms. Since gender is mediated by fantasy, history, and desire, we mostly work to make it livable.
Ann Pellegrini and Avgi Saketopoulou offer an aperture in the echo chamber of psychoanalysis, dialogue emerging from the very sites where identity has too often been presumed, policed, or pathologized. What they present is not a tidy conclusion, but a shared becoming: a rigorous surrender to the complexity of gender, theory, and the unconscious as sites of continual emergence. They speak not merely of transness, but through it – as a lens, a method, and a vital disruption that psychoanalysis can no longer afford to dismiss, domesticate, or defer.
Their conversation with us, Stacy Berlin and Estelle Shane, holds both tenderness and torque. They do not argue for a place at the analytic table but for a reconstitution of the table itself, one capacious enough to hold contradiction, opacity, ambivalence, and the risks of clinical encounter. The name, body, and the analyst’s own gender are all invited to the shifiting playing field.
They resist th