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This anthology of papers is the sequel to the special issue entitled Trans* Becomings and Countertransference: A Contemporary Perspective From France, published in The Psychoanalytic Review in December 2021. I initially conceived these two issues as a large-scale project at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the first lockdown in France in March 2020, while disconcerted by the novel virus and overwhelmed by the demand for online consultations and the social isolation felt both by my patients and myself, I elaborated this project in order to cope with the puzzling anxiety triggered by this new situation. My hope was to bring together colleagues from France and overseas in order to reflect on countertransference challenges in relation to gender-variant analysands, a topic becoming increasingly important in Western, indeed world cultures. In this strange context of global lockdowns and academic solitude, I sought to initiate a virtual dialogue between authors from different linguistic traditions, psychoanalytic cultures, and clinical and social backgrounds to create a space of polyphonic thinking about trans* and countertransference.
Grounded in the ideal of polyphony, my idea primarily draws on Platonic dialogues. In this foundational philosophical genre, the “truth” is not the prerogative of the enlightened Socrates but rather the outcome of a disputatio between different interlocutors with an array of conflicting and nonhierarchized views. Soviet thinker Mikhail Bakhtin (1929/1973, 1982) deepened this understanding of polyphony and dialogism in his analyses of Dostoevsky's novels1: to write in the Dostoevskyan mode is to engage with multiple voices (based on the etymological meaning of polyphony) that neither merge into a single perspective nor are subordinated to the voice of the author. The characters speak for themselves, even against the author, who no longer monopolizes the “power to mean.”