Introduction to special issue: Contemporary writing on transgender and relational psychoanalysis

Abstract

This special section of Psychoanalytic Perspectives presents four papers on themes relating to transgender, a subject that is front of mind in both the cultural/ political landscape as well as in the psychoanalytic arena. We publish this special section as a way to support both analysts and patients, and also to confront the backlash of our cultural moment. Goldner (2011) writes that we cannot say that gender crossing is “never a symptom of, or a defense against, psychic distress or trauma” (p. 167); but these essays highlight the analyst’s, the profession’s, and indeed our culture’s anxiety as much as our patients’, with an emphasis not on etiology but on the reduction of suffering. In different ways, they argue for the continual need to examine, expand, chal-lenge, and rethink our notions of gender and gender identity, and to safeguard our patients’ ability to formulate and understand their own subjective sense of self.