LETICIA GLOCER FIORINI - ARGENTINE
Body and time in the non binary scene.
Summary
In contemporary societies, various itineraries of sexualities and genders become visible and challenge the psychoanalytic field, theoretically and clinically. I will address some of these challenges: 1- The role of norms and their influence on subjectivities in general and on the position of each analyst in particular. 2- The role of bodies in the non-binary field. 3- The concept of temporality at stake.
In the clinic we will focus on the certainties and uncertainties about transition and the weight of anguish when it overflows any possibility of waiting, especially in children and adolescents. On the one hand, urgency and suffering arise; on the other hand, the power of norms related to sexual and gender difference. It is emphasised that there is no possibility of universalising the issues at stake, although there may be points in common. The tendency to classify leads to a listening obstruction.
AVGI SAKETOPOULOU - USA
Trans adolescents, trans embodiment: rethinking metapsychology, rethinking technique.
Summary
Psychoanalysis’s treatment of trans children and trans adolescents ranges from moral panic that masquerades as psychoanalysis to facile, conceptually lazy “acceptance”. Both are problematic and insufficient, and in this presentation, Dr. Saketopoulou sidesteps them to propose, instead, that the difficulty our field is experiencing around trans youth has to do with the challenges trans experience and embodiments pose to our metapsychology. These challenges, she will discuss, are not threats but opportunities. Fleshing out the particular pressures transness places on psychoanalytic theorizing -around the sexual, embodiment, ethics, and psychic time- this presentation will also touch on the questionable category of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” often-voiced concerns about the irreversibility of transition for adolescents, and fears around regret and de-transitioning. Short clinical examples will highlight how we may re-think psychoanalytic work with such youth.
FRANÇOIS RICHARD - FRANCE
Is the analysis of unconscious identifications possible with transgender adoles-cents?
Summary
We are disconcerted by these adolescents who declare that they do not know very well what their gender is, refuse the one they have been assigned and sometimes engage in a body transformation procedure.
By definition, in adolescence, a subject does not know very well who he is! This existential rather than identity-related disorder can lead them to the solution, ideologically valued by contemporary culture, of the transgender process. We must accompany him without encouraging or discouraging him, seeking rather to encourage his capacity to reflexively feel things in his personal and family history. Superficial feelings of identity often hide disorders of primary unconscious regressive identifications typical of the deformed Oedipus ( F.Richard, "Le Surmoi perverti. Bisexualité psychique et états limites", Paris, Campagne première, 2021). The trans project expresses oedipal conflicts that are difficult to analyse. Access to psychic complexity, where the man's femininity is not exactly the same as the woman's, and the woman's masculinity not exactly the same as the man's, is easier - in the "series" (Freud) between masculine and feminine. Is the bodily change an avoidance or a fulfilment of sexual polymorphism? The answer is to be found on a case-by-case basis, where the legal factor must not be neglected: is the subject an adult or a minor?
