Transference and Countertransference Dynamics in a Multifamily Group for Transgender Adolescents

This article is an account of a pioneering multifamily group for transgender adolescents. Meetings were conducted in a Sexual Identity Consultation Service in a Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department in Paris. In addition to enabling both teenagers and their parents to escape a certain form of isolation, this novel mental health care setting also reinforced the ability of participants to free associate and to cathect substitute objects. The author highlights specific characteristics of transference movements and countertransference reactions of the therapists in this framework. An additional goal is to promote these innovative groups and to recommend similar groups for transgender adolescents and their parents.

“Are We Safe Analysts?” Cisgender Countertransferential Fantasies in the Treatment of Transgender Patients

The authors examine the impact of countertransference in two clinical cases of transgender patients treated by two cisgender analysts who are accustomed to receiving nonconforming gender patients in France and Brazil. The context is that of contemporary views of transphobic countertransference reactions, specifically the work of Griffin Hansbury, who describes these reactions in terms of “unthinkable anxieties.” Like other theorists with expanding notions of countertransference, the authors view transphobia in analysis as an “instrument of research” and consider how taking responsibility for the transference is particularly relevant in respect to clinical cases that also reflect societal changes. Following the authors’ case presentations, they identify four different fantasies and countertransferential reactions that sprang from their efforts to be safe analysts or, in other words, analysts concerned about the perpetuation of discrimination, violence, and oppression that may have guided their work.

Countertransference Madness: Supervision, Trans∗, and the Sexual

Drawing on Ferenczi's “confusion of tongues” paradigm, the author argues that the internalization of the supervisor's superego has the potential not only to expand the supervisee's ego (introjection), but also to repress their idiosyncratic functions and attack their thinking activity (intropression). To illustrate this argument, the author recounts his own supervised treatment of a transgender patient during which the supervisor-supervisee transference lapsed into a sadomasochistic dialectic and a folie à deux, leading to the premature termination of both the therapy and the supervision. While the initial interpretation of this experience underscored the supervisor's transphobia, the après-coup of writing up the case has revealed more complex thinking. Accordingly, the countertransference madness to which the author succumbed with his supervisor can now be understood as the unbinding of repressed infantile sexuality and the reenactment of paradoxical scenarios that the patient experienced with his parents.

A Trans∗ Zapping of Psychoanalysis

In France, transsexualism was introduced in psychoanalysis through the mediation of medicine. The statements of psychoanalysts on transgender people are considered as offensive by the people concerned. Since the 1970s, trans∗ people have refused to be objectified as “clinical cases” and have decided to “zap” psychoanalysis, the vehicle for a violent, discriminatory rhetoric redolent of psychiatry. Is a critical debate between the knowledge derived from the Freudian field and from the gay, lesbian, and trans∗ field possible in order to revamp the questionings on gender and sexuality? Can psychoanalytical theory and practice overcome their political-psychiatric origins by taking into account the knowledge and theories of transpédégouines (“transgaylesbian” or “queer”)?

Gender Trouble and Return of the Sexual in a Cisgender Research Collective Confronted With Trans∗ Femininity

The author analyzes a research study of trans∗ women and their surgeons, conducted before and after vaginoplasty in a French public hospital service. The essay is an examination of countertransference in three research frameworks: (1) working with a research team; (2) taking part in a peer group, facilitated by a psychologist, a surgeon, and a secretary, bringing together women who had already undergone surgery and those awaiting it; and (3) research interviews with Lara, a 64-year-old trans∗ woman. The author emphasizes the importance of taking into account gender countertransference—that is, the disruptive effects of the encounter with trans∗ people and their desires, paying specific attention to what the encounter with trans∗ femininities has stirred or revealed in terms of the author's own relationship to the body and to cisgender femininity.

Fantasmorphoses and Hybrid Becomings of Identities

Deleuze and Guattari crafted the concept of “becoming” as a way of theorizing the rampant chimerization and polymorphism of identities in today's world. They used Kafka's work to show how the frequent use of metamorphosis in his stories prefigures this widespread phenomenon of hybridization of identities. The frequency of such hybrid becomings raises questions about the very foundations of modernity's subjective construct. Does this proliferation reflect new configurations of desiring activities, or is it the result of early interference in what Melanie Klein conceptualized as “primary confusion”? The author will use Klein's notion to show how, early in life, envy of the breast and primary confusion can blur the organization of binary logic essential to establishing the ability to judge and the activity of primal symbolization.

Against Neuropsychoanalysis: Why a Dialogue With Neuroscience Is Neither Necessary nor Sufficient for Psychoanalysis

The author argues against neuropsychoanalysis by focusing on the metaphysical issues. Neuropsychoanalysts argue that the philosophical theories of dual aspect monism (DAM) and anomalous monism support their position. The author contends that not only do DAM and anomalous monism not offer support for neuropsychoanalysis; they are also inconsistent with its claims. The conceptual distinction between the mental and the physical — the so-called “epistemological dualism” cited by neuropsychoanalysis—stands as an insurmountable barrier to the project of neuropsychoanalysis. By way of example, the author offers an analogy with artworks. The author concludes the paper by arguing that neuropsychoanalysis deflects from the real project of psychoanalysis, which is the study of persons, not so-called “mindbrains.”