Over 11 and 12 March 2017, The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis hosted a conference, in partnership with the Freud Museum London, entitled ‘Transgender, Gender & Psychoanalysis.’ It ran alongside an extraordinary range of events, including an art exhibition organised and put together by a highly dedicated group of Site trainees. These events were conceived as part of the celebrations for the twentieth anniversary of The Site's founding in 1997. Bringing together an outstanding group of internationally renowned analysts, scholars, artists and activists, the two-day conference and the fortnight of ‘fringe’ events resulted in a deeply thought-provoking and ground-breaking accomplishment. The aim of this ambitious programme was to open psychoanalysis in general – and the Site, in particular – to appreciating what psychoanalysis might learn clinically, theoretically and politically from an encounter with the diversities of the transgender and genderqueer experience, as well as to reflect upon how these multiple experiences might be illuminated by psychoanalysis.
Before a more formal introduction of this special edition of Sitegeist, whose aim is to capture something of the spirit and enthusiasm of this special series of events, I will say a few words about the conference events themselves. An art exhibition exploring and deconstructing some of the themes around the varieties of the transgender experience, ran at Draper Hall, in the Elephant & Castle, to resounding praise from the trans, artistic and psychotherapeutic communities that attended. The organisers, all of whom were trainees, beautifully curated a range of powerful pieces, including contributions of their own challenging and original works. Complementing this, the team screened Xavier Dolan's beautiful and heartfelt film Laurence Anyways at the Cinema Museum in Kennington, followed by an insightful response and Q&A with the fabulous trans journalist Rhyannon Styles. Additionally, the legendary Jo Clifford – who was also one of our speakers at the conference – performed her hugely acclaimed The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven at Draper Hall – a
show that went on to practically incite riot in Brazil later in the year, with its anti-transphobic and pro-inclusivity message.
Running such an ambitious series of events on such pressing and contested contemporary issues arising in the wake of the trans movement's ascent to public awareness, seemed especially fitting in 2017, as that was a very special year for us at the Site, celebrating as we were our twentieth anniversary. Founded in 1997 to foster a critical and creative training and champion engaging clinical and theoretical work venturing beyond the mainstream psychoanalytic movement, the Site has found itself, two decades later, in a position of going from strength to strength. Our membership and trainings have continued to grow and, if we remain at the cutting edge of questioning the clinical encounter, problematizing disciplinary boundaries and subverting the narcissism of theoretical differences, the reasons for this might be because we continue to resist being bound by the weight of institutionalism, fettered by slavish transferences to proper names or united in the fight for sectarian causes. This opens up a space for confronting what is genuinely new and emergent within the contemporary clinical encounter. Such an encounter, in turn, demands the relentless renewal of thinking and practising ‘otherwise.’ As evidenced by the many events and presentations that contributed to make up the conference fortnight, while we as individuals might disagree – and disagree profoundly with one another – we continue to get on with our work in the spaces between other people's -isms and schisms.
If we continue to thrive, then the conference seemed to indicate that this was for a very simple reason. Above all else, the conference attested to the fact that we at the Site are foremost a community, a clinical community, committed to the twofold project of interrogating what it is that we do when we do psychoanalysis and seeking ever better collective clinical responses to the enormous pool of emotional distress the world confronts us with. The 2017 conference then served as more than a new initiative, because it was also a recollection – without implying a previous forgetting – of our Site roots. These roots, grounded in a dismantling of the normative and normalizing, a rejection of spurious binaries, a confrontation with essentialising strategies and a fierce resistance to the
exclusion and pathologization of oppressed identities, were the common ground that brought us at The Site into a long overdue conversation with the trans and genderqueer communities. These are communities, it should be remembered, that majoritarian psychoanalysis – no less than popular opinion – had too often regarded with a misunderstanding born of a suspicion shrouded in lazy preconceptions. Ironically, it was precisely this that enabled us, over the conference fortnight, to get on with doing what we do best at The Site: breaking with mainstream discourse; challenging presuppositions; debating; dissenting; fearlessly thinking otherwise.
As the papers collected in this issue of Sitegeist demonstrate, thinking otherwise and resisting mainstream discourse, does not come without significant risks and challenges. The conference proved to be emotionally taxing and intellectually provocative. How to strike the balance between retaining the conceptual framework of psychoanalysis to explore trans and genderqueer experiences, whilst not allowing this framework and perspective to cancel out those very experiences and identities? What, for that matter, would such a balance even look like? It is one thing to have theoretical differences – a preference for phenomenology, a greater accent on object relations, an insistence on Lacanian metapsychology – and quite another thing when these differences directly bear upon the nature of an identity that has borne witness to a history of marginalisation, silencing and pathologization. The risk for unintended symbolic violence, of colonising the experience of another with an alien language and thereby setting up an ‘us and them’ dichotomy, was pervasive. However, if trans and genderqueer experiences risked being subsumed by psychoanalysis – and the history of its encounter with psychoanalysis attests to this fact – then the opposite was equally true: how might psychoanalysis open itself up to being reconfigured by trans and genderqueer experiences, without also losing its identity?
It is this mutual dialectic for both psychoanalysis and the trans and genderqueer experience, between the losing and retaining of identity, that this special edition of Sitegeist aims to capture something of, negotiating a perilous ethical and political path that is the open encounter with respective
otherness, that seeks to understand without such understanding doing violence. All the pieces collected in the edition speak eloquently for themselves, so there is no need to summarise and introduce them. The papers presented in this volume, from Dina Al-Kassim, Henry Strick, Sheila Cavanagh, Damian McCann and Juliet Jacques, were all presented at the conference. In their very divergent preoccupations, forms and styles, they all reflect something of the variety of thinking-through and responding to this ‘perilous path’, addressing many different questions raised by the trans and genderqueer experience, clinically, politically and theoretically.
Unfortunately, due to prior publishing commitments elsewhere, we were not able to include papers presented to the conference by Domenico Di Ceglie, Julie Walsh and Dany Nobus, that further fan out the breadth of critical, creative, clinical and theoretical positions that were represented over the two days. However, we are delighted that, in the latter section, we are able to introduce two outstanding new papers, from trainee-clinicians at The Site, who were involved with either running the conference or who have subsequently responded to the conference. The first is a paper by Laura Chernaik, reflecting on the contribution she made to the conference art exhibition, using this as a jumping-off point from which to freshly theorise aspects of non-binary identities, in conversation with Donna Harraway, Lacan, Bion and others. The second is a piece by Guy Millon, detailing and reflecting upon some of the challenging experiences and dilemmas that he has encountered working in a Gender Identity Clinic service in the South West of the U.K.