Intransigence

Under pressure coming from advocacy associations, investigators and clinicians working on gender issues have had to cancel conferences in Paris. The conferences were a work in progress meant to contribute and clarify to a robust debate. Did this work promise an ultimate truth? Was this work a threat? It will not be known because the disputatio has been terminated in ovo.

A theater play has also been canceled. Written by a transgender person, it had been played by an actress, more than twenty times -before, according to a news article, the playwright changed his mind about the interpretation of his autobiographical narrative an insisted only a transgender actor play the trans character. Can we affirm that a real misanthrope is needed to play The Misanthrope? This need of a semblable that would be the same, even for the representation, forces us to question our clinical practice and the possibility of a fellow man, that would be an other.

Just as a woman patient steered Freud to invent the talking cure by demanding to shut up, we could believe that, one more time, the demand is made to psychoanalysts to shut up. However, our trans patients are not cancelling their sessions but demanding to be listened to, demanding a presence. And as to the sex of the analyst, the gender or sexual orientation (not always explicit) play a role in the commitment to an analysis. It can help or it can sometime hinder, like any other trait; it is discussed and overcome. The position of the analyst is not that from which to make a moral judgement, or to make policy or even less to hold a certain ultimate knowledge of a patient. Psychoanalysis is above all to pose a question and is not intended to teach a lesson.

Whatever the suffering and the identity of a patient, what concerns a psychoanalyst is the truth of our relationship to speech which has denatured us all. Of this truth the psychoanalyst is in a love trance.

Wishing that this new year be fertile and that the exchanges among us (each other) be clairvoyant.

Omar Guerrero, pour le Bureau de l’ALI

Translation : Lorena Strunk