Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning

A Lacanian approach

Oren Gozlan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317629078
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Winner of The American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) Book Prize for 2015

Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian approach presents a startling new way to consider psychoanalytic dilemmas of sexual difference and gender through the meeting of arts and the clinic. Informed by a Lacanian perspective that locates transsexuality in the intermediate space between the clinic and culture, Oren Gozlan joins current conversations around the question of sexual difference with the insistence that identity never fully expresses sexuality and, as such, cannot be replaced by gender.

The book goes beyond the idea of gender as an experience that gives rise to multiple identities and instead considers identity as split from the outset. This view transforms transsexuality into a particular psychic position, able to encounter the paradoxes of transitional experience and the valence of phantasy and affect that accompany aesthetic conflicts over the nature of beauty and being. Gozlan brings readers into the enigmatic qualities of representation as desire for completion and transformation through notions of tension, difference and aesthetics through examining the artwork of Anish Kapoor and Louise Bourgeois and the role played by confusion in the aesthetics of transformation in literature and memoir. Each chapter of the book presents a productive take on understanding the psychoanalytic demand to sustain and consider the dilemma that the unconscious presents to the knowledge and recognition of gender. Fundamentally, this work understands transsexuality as a creative act, rich with desire and danger, in which thinking of the transsexual body as both an analytic and a subjective object helps us to reveal the creativity of sexuality.

Ideal for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers as well as students of psychoanalysis, cultural studies, literature studies and philosophy, Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning offers a unique insight into psychoanalytic approaches to transsexuality and the question of assuming a position in gender.

Chapter 1

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Transsexuality as a state of mind

Questions of learning and indeterminacy

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His death makes me into an empty soughing of a
father and mother, extract a breast within me … thus,
with a transparent scalpel, his death carves new
knowledge in me: loss is forever feminine.

David Grossman, From Falling out of time

In contemporary cultural life, the visibility of transsexuality is part of a larger cultural revolution reorienting the nature of identity, sociality and modes of self-fashioning. The therapeutic clinic, however, lags behind: transsexuality is still considered a pathological condition. Historically, psychoanalysis has approached the experience of transsexuality through questions of “gender certainty” and “sexual difference”, often invoked as separating the boundaries between normalcy and pathology. Contemporary theories of gender (e.g. Benjamin, 1998; Dimen, 2003; Harris, 2005) attempt to de-pathologize transsexuality, although these theories often treat gender categories as sociological descriptors. Even when masculinity and femininity are approached as psychic positions (e.g. Gherovici, 2010), discussions are often limited to “the transsexual individual”. Missing is a conceptualization of transsexuality as a psychical position and discussions on how its subject formation affects the imaginary of psychoanalysis. In this book, I attempt to broaden our conception of transsexuality, shifting the focus from the “transsexual patient” to the analyst’s thought processes. I do so by considering questions of desire, sexuality and sexual difference.

The main claim throughout this book involves what I consider to be the phenomenological dimension of transsexuality, understood both as a transformation at the level of the flesh and as a term that captures the universality of sexuality, which is always transformative and in transit. I argue for the need for an aesthetic shift in psychoanalytic discourse, one capable of understanding sexuality as always already in transition (Gozlan, 2011). Mainly, I hope to show that, like the aesthetic object, sexual difference does not embody intent but, rather, constitutes the unrepresentable tension that the gender binary both enacts and veils. In taking an aesthetic approach to the question of transsexuality, I intend to signify the difficult encounter with the fragility of knowledge and certainty, as conditions for creativity and thought that open the subject to his or her own difference.

In my psychoanalytic practice, I often encounter patients who express certainty about who they are but whose bodies do not match their perception of being situated in gender as male or female. For many such patients, the body becomes a battle ground where the urgency to settle into one gender becomes heightened by the felt impossibility of reaching such certainty. The body sabotages the desire to be a man or a woman and is often hated for not being “masculine or feminine enough”. Such patients often perceive this incongruity between their body and the language of male/female as intolerable and they often yearn for complete harmony between body and psychic identification. Many transgender and transsexual individuals I see in my practice are preoccupied with their discomfort over the perceived indeterminacy of their bodies, anxious about not being recognized in their desired gender or, even worse, threatened by being perceived as strange, abject, repulsive bodies.

The narratives accompanying this frustration are often laced with fantasies of an idealized embodiment, which often prevents these patients from experiencing satisfaction with and relative settlement in their given bodies. Statements such as “I am not a ‘real’ man/woman” are accompanied with mute fights with the body through skin picking, cutting, anorexia and other forms of self-injury. Narratives of exciting pre-adolescent years are quite common among these patients. They share memories of the thrill of wearing clothes of “the other sex”, tinged with a sense of the forbidden or a seeming carelessness about one’s gender and objects of desire. Pre-pubescent years are often described as a time of exploration and excitement about the open possibilities. For some, however, memories of adolescence contain a sense of despair, a self-punishing sense of transgression and chaos, often articulated in repetitive, nostalgic and melancholic narratives. The wish to be a “real” man/woman paired with the sense of not being “good enough” in either imagined embodiment speak to the fantasy of having a body that is “outside” or “beyond” sex, one that transgresses the law of sexual difference. The fantasy of the wholeness of sex and hence of ultimate satisfaction that often lurks behind this desire becomes an obstacle to enjoyment as the psychic experience of one’s sexual embodiment does not coincide with a body that always fails.

It is tempting to stay with clinic and wonder about the meaning of the transsexual plea. However, in limiting our examination to the clinic and to the experience of “the transsexual patient” we are at risk of failing to attend to larger questions of sexual identity and desire and their role in subject formation. We cease, for example, to consider the role of sexuality in psychic organization, to pose the question of how sexuality disrupts or enlivens the “ground of being” (Parker, 2011, p. 16). The moment we consider questions of desire and embodiment, wholeness and impossibility, satisfaction and transgression, as embedded in the experience of transsexuality, we are engaging with the imaginary, symbolic and real registers of sexuality as human experience. These Lacanian categories are helpful for conceptualizing transsexuality beyond the pathologization characteristic of medical and psychiatric discourses.

My orientation follows the Lacanian view that analytic listening is placed on absence, silences, omissions, gaps in meaning and the question of desire. The analyst may not fill the absence with meaning, and while the analytic encounter is not a corrective experience, it serves as a fragile symbolic link between the self and other. It is meant to awake an enigma and with it, the potential for desire and less debilitating self-definitions. This focus on absence understands language as fragmenting, castrating, but also as providing a signifying difference that opens up previously closed circuits of meaning. Once transsexuality is imagined as psychical experience, we may enter into questions of truth, beauty and knowledge and the tensions between them. Meltzer approaches these questions in relation to the apprehension of the mother’s body.

Transsexuality of everyday life

Meltzer poses the beauty of the mother’s body as the first enigmatic object for the infant and names this encounter an “aesthetic conflict” (2008). Here is where the conflict begins: something cannot be seen and it is with the invisible that the baby is preoccupied. The baby’s interest in what is inside the (m)other’s body leaves a trace, a problem of origin and a demand to understand. Meltzer posits the encounter of the baby with the infinite enigma of the maternal body as both satisfying and violent because satisfaction is also experienced as violating the limits of the infant’s body. Hence, our first position in relation to beauty is ambivalent in the sense that such beauty stands before the child, it is not a creation of the child. The baby feels he is the creator of the breast, yet experiences the breast as otherness through its unavailability. In this sense, the beauty and enigmatic character of the mother’s otherness disrupts the infant’s primary narcissism and inaugurates a conflict between sensual apprehension and creative imagination, “between the inside and the outside, between essence and appearance, and between presence and absence” (Britzman, forthcoming).

The notion of aesthetic conflict allows us to conceptualize the subject’s gradual capacity to register otherness, before and beyond words. The enigmatic presence of the other arouses curiosity and allows questions and doubt, thus calling forth a search for meaning that constitutes the grounds for connection and intimacy. But doubt also brings forth anxiety and pain that often stirs a violent wish to see the other’s insides. It is in between this search for knowledge and truth, on the one hand, and fantasies of intrusive projective identification, on the other, that the subject walks the narrow path of imagination.

Meltzer posits a link between aesthetic conflict, on the one hand, and dynamics of thought and relationality on the other, where the experience of satisfaction is often accompanied by a sense of violation through the registration of difference. Such violation of boundaries experienced through the registration of care – which Meltzer describes as a “mindless” operation (p. 68) – entails the employment of received symbols functioning “as signs” (p. 68), as well as exchanges of sight, touch, smell, pain and pleasure between mother and infant. The apprehension of beauty occurs in and through these exchanges in the form of compromise formations that involve pleasure, captivation, fear, suspense and weariness, and which inaugurate the capacity for sublimation. There is a violence implicit in such sensorial and affective apprehension of the object, for the registration of its otherness prompts its disavowal as a way to reduce the tension of aesthetic conflict. The aesthetic conflict, in other words, captures the way in which the infant, in her need for emotional contact, attempts to degrade the object as known and certain. The encounter with the enigma of the primal (desiring) parental body triggers a turbulent desire to know, that is, to break the barrier between inside and outside. Fragmenting the other into partial objects where the parental body is treated as an “inanimate machine” or as “matter like faeces” (Meltzer, 2008, p. 73) is a common mechanism that attempts to transform the other from unidentifiable into recognizable and hence to degrade the object by denying its foreboding otherness. Since the impacting other is also an internalized object, the degradation of the object through splitting is also an attack on self-difference and, therefore, on thinking.

As a gradually developing capacity to create psychic space, a transitional area of both impasse and connection, thinking involves the possibility of holding things in one’s mind, where emotional experience is stored as memory rather than acted out. Heidegger conceives of thinking as a “holding steady” (Heidegger, 1966, p. 62) thus reconceptualizing what is often understood as a deliberate seeking into a restrained “waiting”. This presupposes both the development of psychic space and the temporalization of experience. It is a process, in short, that involves the “becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time” (Derrida, 1982, p. 8). The creation of internal transitional space is linked with the process of apprehension of beauty. What is apprehended is the affect evoked through the experience of aesthetic conflict that becomes tolerable through its links with an internalized object of care. In this sense, the apprehension of beauty is a necessary condition for the creation of internal transitional space, where the tension between the registration of the parental other as an object of care that, nevertheless, remains enigmatic, can be sustained. To tolerate the experience of transitionality means, therefore, to sustain the inner tension of the differentiating encounter with the other through one’s curiosity and the ability to embody the psychic conflict.

Embodied apprehension

Thinking about the transsexual body as a place of emotional meaning, and hence as a psychic position, opens the question of how gender elicits an aesthetic conflict. If gender functions as a veil for the constitutive instability of the subject split by her unconscious, it can be argued that every gender disposition carries a kernel of helplessness, anxiety and guilt, and therefore it is vulnerable to dissociation, splitting and idealization. Meltzer’s conceptualization of the apprehension of beauty captures the paradox of grasping and simultaneously being unsettled by the other’s enigmatic body. While Winnicott understands the aesthetic encounter mainly as an experience of continuity and holding (Winnicott, 1971), Meltzer’s notion of aesthetic conflict signals both the containing and disruptive qualities of the experience of apprehension of beauty. This paradox that is experienced in the encounter between the infant and the mother is also experienced, I argue, with objects of art and the transsexual body, thus producing an ambivalent affective scenario. In other words, the encounter with the transsexual body and with the object of art constitutes an opportunity to apprehend and be apprehended by the difference registered through embodied experiences of transitionality. Both the insufficiency of gender categorizations in signifying the ambiguous body and the inadequacy of our sensibility and imagination in making sense of the enigmatic object of art hold the potential and risks that Meltzer identifies at the core of the aesthetic conflict.

The desire to apprehend the beautiful and enigmatic object carries within it the tension aroused by an uncertainty that is also the foundation of desire. In thinking through the enigma elicited by the ambiguously gendered body, gender reveals itself as a paradoxical concept, simultaneously a placeholder that sustains the tension of sexual difference, and a concretization of desire’s polymorphous nature. Accordingly, to think of gender as an aesthetic category, as a space for the apprehension of beauty, means to consider its role in the registration and denial of difference. As a response to the enigma of desire, the concept of gender involves both the degradation of the ambiguous object through splitting and concretization and, at the same time, it functions as a signifier that holds beauty, truth and knowledge in tension. The interpellation of gender is both a conscious and an unconscious hailing of the child that positions her in a symbolic system of sexual difference from birth, or even before. It is sustained by the unconscious maternal environment, which includes not only the mother’s unconscious desire but the totality of her history, an environment that is continually reinforced by a social discourse that is all encompassing and whose boundaries – its own self-difference – are impossible to identify. Gender is both culture’s response to unconscious difference and, at the same time, an attempt to render sexual difference legible by eradicating difference itself. In other words, insofar as the dichotomy masculine/feminine ultimately holds the promises of the wholeness of sexual identity and the complementarity between the genders, it ultimately fails both to inscribe and eradicate the enigma of sexual difference; sexuality remains, therefore, an ever-proliferating question, which no gender division can stabilize. As Žižek argues, rather than closing up the question of sexuation, the real of sexual difference reveals the arbitrary and insufficient character of every symbolic articulation of the gender divide: “Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic opposition(s) is doomed to fail, and it is this very ‘impossibility’ that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what ‘sexual difference’ will mean” (Žižek, 2002, p. 61).

As a form of knowing, gender functions as a process of identification with the unconscious naming of the other that defends the subject against the polymorphous perversity of desire: always accidental and in flux. Yet, gender is also repetition of that which it attempts to eradicate insofar as it also holds a trace of the polymorphous perversity of the drive, a promise of a return to a state of satisfaction through a phantasy of wholeness in self-coincidence and unity through the complementarity of gender.

The notion of gender as a conflictual attempt to both signify and eradicate difference is echoed in Winnicott’s understanding of femininity and masculinity as internal positions in relation to the unknown of the mother’s body (Winnicott, 1971). For Winnicott, these positions define subjectivity and are independent of genital sex. They represent, respectively, “being” and “doing”, passivity and activity, as responses to the enigmatic encounter with the otherness of the maternal body. “Being” implies tolerance toward one’s passive stance in relation to the unknown, to difference, but it is also a “maiming” because it signifies a dependency on an intractable exteriority that survives the baby’s ruthless attacks (Winnicott, 1971). “Being” is contrasted with “doing”, which refers to the quest for satisfaction, the need to act as if one could know, possess and control time and gender; a position saturated with certitude and, as such, omnipotent. Certitude, however, can never be sure of its own certainty; it constitutes an anxious response to the ambiguity and instability of the psychic object, a necrotizing response to transitionality and a symbolic equation that attempts to collapse the space between self and object. In contrast, Winnicott argues, recognition of the transitionality inherent in object-relating is a condition for symbolization.

Lacan also treats femininity and masculinity as psychic positions in relation to the unknown of desire (Lacan, 1999). Understood as positions in relation to one’s self-otherness, assuming a gender signifies an acceptance of an answer regarding one’s place in the symbolic order. While one can identify as male or female and hold on to notions of femininity or masculinity as coherent categories, this gender certainty represents an attempt to obliterate the difference within the self and to domesticate the “real of sex”, that is, the non-metabolizable kernel that resists meaning or symbolization. In this model, gender certainty become aligned with phallic mastery and power while the remainder, which cannot be symbolized, is associated with the feminine, which stands in helpless relation to the Real. Femininity here does not represent a gender, but a psychic position that goes beyond the phallic structure of “castrated” “non-castrated”, and as such, it does not constitute an “answer” to the real of sex. Rather, it is linked with the traumatic Real (Verhaeghe, 2001, p. 38) that cannot be signified, and in this way, enigmatic and transitional.

Lacan’s and Winnicott’s conceptions of femininity and masculinity are helpful in theorizing sexual difference as psychic positions that exceed symbolic articulation, that is, as always incomplete identifications which fail to contain the real of sexual difference. In Winnicott’s terms, a transitional space or object does not mark a point where the harmonious integration of drive and culture is achieved. On the contrary, it is a space where the impossibility of such integration is tolerated through compromise formations, which allow for creative resignifications. In this sense, transitional spaces and objects allow for the experience of “living in suspense”, as the capacity to accept reality as an always-shifting compromise formation, never absolute, always in question.

Artistic expression constitutes for Winnicott one of the paradigmatic forms of the experience of the “in-between”, a transitional area between internal and external reality (Winnicott, 1971). The creative object holds meaning and constitutes a symbol of what cannot be fully represented. It is a placeholder that sustains the ambiguous relation between desire and knowledge, yet translates this instability into tolerable tension through its plasticity, a malleable link between the literal and the metaphoric. The object of art is never in charge of itself (Britzman, 2009), it can never completely express or satisfy the subject’s desire and, in its effervescence, opens the subject to his or her own lack. The uncanny inexhaustibility that characterizes the in-between experience of the artistic encounter resonates with questions of embodiment and the way in which the body’s estrangement always exceeds the literalness of our symbolic articulations of gender. I, therefore, find in art a metaphor for narrating a set of preoccupations that concern the dispersal of desire and its polymorphous nature, along with an embodied response to this dispersal. In examining Anish Kapoor’s art, in particular his installation “Memory”, and a sample of Louise Bourgeois’ work, I want to understand how the creation of such intermediate space produces a form of aesthetic crisis for the viewer.

Like the aest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Transsexuality as a state of mind: questions of learning and indeterminacy
• 2 The aesthetics of transitioning
• 3 Narrating transsexuality: transition from memoir to literature
• 4 Transsexual surgery: a novel reminder and a navel remainder
• 5 The “real” time of gender
• 6 Re-writing the screen
• Conclusion: afterwordness
• References
• Index