Trans Realism: Psychoanalysis and the Trans Experience

 “The RealReal in Psychoanalysis and in the Trans Experience”

Patricia Gherovici

“Imagine denying your core and soul.” (p. 3) “If I become a woman I will be my real self.” (p.182) “I think it’s much easier for a trans woman or a trans man who authentically kind of looks and plays the role.” (p. 197) The preceding quotes from Caitlyn Jenner’s The Secrets Of My Life (2017), a memoir “written during the pivotal first years of becoming her authentic self” (book front flap), exhibit a typical reference to truth and authenticity. We can thus ask what is “true” and what is “authentic” in the realm of gender transition. In this domain, can we follow Martin Heidegger who criticizes the concept of “truth” defined as an adequation between thought and reality in order to promote a concept of authenticity as unconcealment? It looks like this has been the itinerary of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), a first book appealing to a notion of authenticity and taking gender as performance, as an imitation for which there is no original. The trans response to these conflicting positions would consist in pursuing an undeniable truth, which is all the more powerful because it contradicts the appearance of the body. I will explore the concept of “realness” as pointing to the convergence of these problematic ideas and in contradistinction to Lacan’s concept of the Real that has to be demarcated from Reality. To do so, I will reread Janet Mock’s groundbreaking memoir Redefining Realness in order to compare its conclusions with other “truths” that are revealed in our clinical experience.

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“Trans Realism, Psychoanalytic Practice, and the Rhetoric of Technique”

Grace Lavery

In “Trans Realism, Psychoanalytic Practice, and the Rhetoric of Technique” Grace Lavery argues that, in Eliot’s early, definitive statement of realism in the seventeenth chapter of Adam Bede, realism will only have been accomplished when readers have learned not merely to respect, but to desire, the dysphorically sexed bodies of others. In this sense, Lavery argues, realism shares a central tenet with two of the more controversial and, frankly, neglected dimensions of Freudian thinking – which Freud himself took to be indispensable components in the treatment of neurotics – castration complex and penis envy. Though post-Freudian analysts have frequently found these dimensions of libidinal embodiment distasteful, to trans people they are central and in certain respects definitive aspects of social participation. Hence, while trans studies tends to eschew psychoanalysis altogether, and the only psychoanalysts to write about trans people tend to be Lacanians for whom “technique” is a mystification, re-appraising the “realist” dimension of psychoanalytic practice can reveals the trans logic at the core of both Freud’s project and Eliot’s.

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Papers to be followed by a discussion.