Transgender studies has, generally speaking, paid more attention (albeit critical attention) to sexological than psychoanalytic schools of thought. Pioneering, openly homosexual sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld—founder of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1897 that sought to secure the rights of sexual minorities, author of the early and influential casebook Die Transvestiten (1910), and instrumentally useful medical ally for trans people seeking access to genital surgery, hormone therapy, name change, and legal recognition of their self-understood gender identity—is accorded the status of sympathetic fellow traveler in trans circles. Sigmund Freud? Not so much. This is a shame, because psychoanalysis offers exciting—and underdeveloped—potentials for trans studies.
Hirschfeld had actually been a founding member in 1908 of Berlin's Psychoanalytic Association, but he broke with psychoanalysis in 1911 after a very public three-way spat between him, Freud and Carl Jung. Much of the difficulty between these three “Einsteins of sex” was personal (some of it revolving around homosexuality and homophobia), but it also involved genuine differences in theoretical and practical understandings of the roots and motivations of human sexuality. Hirschfeld tended toward a biologistic concept of sexuality, while the Freudians and others who retained a psychoanalytic perspective moved toward theories of unconscious drives and identifications whose structures and processes needed to be understood through language, history, culture, and embodied phenomenological experience, and these were incapable of being explained by biology alone.
Psychoanalysis ranks alongside Darwinian theories of evolution and Marxian critiques of political economy as a foundational framework for modern Western secular thought, whether or not one embraces those rubrics in any formal or orthodox fashion. While psychiatric power as a social institution has been resisted on many fronts, structuralist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, antiracist, feminist, and queer versions of psychoanalytic theory have nevertheless offered trenchant critiques of the dominant forms of heteropatriarchal and heterosexist culture. The contribution of psychoanalysis to the investigation of trans topics has been more limited, however, owing no doubt to a long history of interpreting transgender phenomena as psychopathological, despite the affinity trans cultural studies might be expected to have with psychoanalytic theory's attunement to the cultural domain.
And yet, as Sheila Cavanagh and the contributors to this remarkable collection of articles, essays, reports, and reviews make abundantly clear, psychoanalytic perspectives are not intrinsically hostile to transgender modes of being in the world. They can offer critical insight into the viability of a transgender sense of self and help to ameliorate individual psychical suffering. Admittedly, opening psychoanalytic theory up in ways that make it useful for living a transgender life requires a bit of revisionism, but what makes the works selected, edited, and contextualized by Cavanagh for this issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly so exciting is that they advance that revisionist project quite powerfully, along numerous lines.
Just as significant, however, if not more so, than the demonstrable usefulness of psychoanalysis for insight into transgender existence, is the usefulness of transgender and transsexual ways of being for revitalizing psychoanalysis itself. What Cavanagh calls “transpsychoanalytics” offers a powerful intervention into conventional psychoanalytic theory. As several of the contributors to this issue point out, confronting the quotidian existence of trans people who are no more or less neurotic or psychotic than cisgender people, and just as mentally healthy, necessitates a profound reevaluation of core psychoanalytic concepts and interpretive traditions, including the concept of sex itself. In the oft-quoted aphorism of Lacanian analyst Patricia Gherovici, “Psychoanalysis needs a sex change.” The work in this issue of TSQ, as well as the contributors' work elsewhere, along with the work of many other trans-affirming clinicians and theorists, is making that psychoanalytic sex change a reality.
Psychoanalytic theory is not everyone's cup of tea. Its foundational assumptions are not universally embraced, and it deploys a specialist vocabulary that some don't have the patience or the inclination to learn. But psychoanalysis nevertheless remains one of the most powerful heuristics available for interpreting, understanding, and living with the affective dimensions of our individual and collective lives, and of the creative and artistic works that impart such meaning to those lives. The capacity of transgender insight to transform the theory and practice of psychoanalysis is one of the surest signs yet that transgender studies, its methods abstracted from living trans lives, has become a vital interdisciplinary undertaking for making and remaking our contemporary social worlds.
