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This special section of Psychoanalytic Perspectives presents four papers on themes relating to transgender, a subject that is front of mind in both the cultural/political landscape as well as in the psychoanalytic arena.
We publish this special section as a way to support both analysts and patients, and also to confront the backlash of our cultural moment. Goldner (2011) writes that we cannot say that gender crossing is “never a symptom of, or a defense against, psychic distress or trauma” (p. 167); but these essays highlight the analyst’s, the profession’s, and indeed our culture’s anxiety as much as our patients’, with an emphasis not on etiology but on the reduction of suffering. In different ways, they argue for the continual need to examine, expand, challenge, and rethink our notions of gender and gender identity, and to safeguard our patients’ ability to formulate and understand their own subjective sense of self.
There is already a substantial body of psychoanalytic literature on transgender written over the last 20 years (for a comprehensive suggested reading list, see Saketopoulou, 2022). The work presented here extends, challenges, and elaborates that scholarship, with contributions by Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot, Sandra Silverman, Hilary Offman, and Patricia Gherovici. These writers are in dialogue, both implicitly and explicitly, with other analysts invested in developing our awareness and criticality. They draw our attention to the multifaceted issues raised by transgender and show how nonconforming or non-normative gender expression challenges our fundamental theories and assumptions about gender and identity, leading to new ways of conceptualizing our work with gender-diverse and trans patients. They keep our focus on the importance of the relationship between the analyst and the analysand in the clinical encounter, with an emphasis on the analyst’s countertransference, while reminding us that psychoanalysis is situated in a particular historical and cultural