What Happens When a Trans Patient Happens

Abstract

Transphobia, now emerging as a limit to the analytic attitude, requires the kind of psychoanalytic investigation that continues in response to misogyny, homophobia, and biphobia, as they figure in both clinical practice and theory building. Without a psychoanalytic investigation into the dynamics of transphobia in psychoanalysis, efforts to conceptualize trans subjects in an analytically open and neutral manner must falter. An exploration of the author’s own efforts to overcome transphobic bias, as well as an analysis of transphobic dynamics in a well-known case in the literature, show some of the challenges that arise when attempts at thinking psychoanalytically get caught up in conscious and unconscious forms of transphobia.

Transgender Identities: A Contemporary Introduction by Alessandra Lemma. Published by Routledge, London and New York, 2022, 132 pp, £15.20 paperback.

“…It might help clinicians and patients to give further consideration to the operation of transphobia in the countertransference and within the subjective experience of our patients. Kloppenberg (2022) helpfully outlines how transphobia can be manifested in both automatic acceptance and automatic opposition. He positions this difficulty in the clinical interaction as part of a larger problem within psychoanalysis in dealing with something felt to be new and strange.…”