Jahrhundertelang wurden Menschen, die ihre Sexualität oder ihr Geschlecht in Zweifel stellten, als hysterisch etikettiert. Sigmund Freud hörte Hysteriker_innen aufmerksam zu und entdeckte so das Unbewusste. Die Psychoanalytikerin Patricia Gherovici baut auf Freud und Lacan auf und wertet in ihrem neuesten Buch die Erkenntnisse aus, die sie im Umgang mit Transgender Patient_innen gewonnen hat. (Ausführliche Ankündigung auf Englisch unten; Quelle: H-HISTSEX Mailingliste)
Patricia Gherovici, Please select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism; London: Routledge, 2010. 316 Seiten. ISBN: 978-0-415-80616-9
Inhaltsverzeichnis und Probekapitel unter http://www.psychoanalysisarena.com/9780415806169
"I have the worst birth defect a woman can have: I was born with a penis and a pair of testicles."
Thus we meet an analysand who shares her reason for starting psychoanalysis and whose statement embodies the debate over transgenderism, rigorously dissected in Please Select Your Gender. Is it a mental disorder, as some would claim, or a matter of sexual
identity? An orientation or a life choice? Despite differing opinions, transgenderism has lost much of its stigma over the past decade or so - though perhaps none of its shock value. Nevertheless, the door is open for a reformulation of the hysterical question, "Am I a man or a woman?"
Since ancient times those who questioned their gender and sexuality were called hysteric. By listening attentively to what hysterics said, Freud discovered the unconscious. He invented psychoanalysis as a method to understand the questions presented by hysteria and as an attempt at resolving the enigmas they posed. The question of sexual difference continues to puzzle us. Today, the issues brought up by transgender patients provide us with new material to rethink gender and sexuality while reorienting clinical practice.
Transgender people question the appearance of their bodies but not their gender; they may say "I am a man trapped in a woman's body" or "Despite my male organs, I always knew I was a woman" and want to change sex. Hysterics are haunted by a core question about sexual identity, a question that can never be answered with certainty while transgender people suffer because of a certainty about gender in contradiction with the body, and take pains trying to modify their body to match their gender.
Anyone who has turned on a television, linked to a blog, or picked up a tabloid magazine, can testify to the media visibility of transgenderism. Isn't it an extension of democracy's ideals that whoever wants it can change gender on demand? Is this just another consumer life-style choice? In fact, quite a number of people within the transgender community present a very different picture from the media glamorization of sex transition. Using clinical examples of transgender and hysterical patients, surveys of transsexual memoirs, discussions of Freud, Lacan, feminist and queer studies authors, and the origins of sexology, this book offers an original way to think about sexual identity and sexual difference while showing how transgenderism is reorienting psychoanalytic practice. It offers an original contribution to the theoretical and clinical understanding of transgenderism, arguing against its pathologization while exploring
what can be called today's democratizing of transgenderism.
About the autor:
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D., is an analyst in private practice and analytic supervisor, founding member and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Study Group and Seminar. She has published in numerous journals and collections, including the foreword to Erotic Anger: A User's
Manual (University of Minnesota Press, 2001) and, most recently, The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press, 2003), winner of the Gradiva Award and the 2004 Boyer Prize.
