What Are Norms for Psychoanalysts? Are There Limits to the Transformation of the Body?
Type de matériel :
20
Body transformations relating to gender identity are becoming increasingly common, and raise the question as to whether one should follow individual or collective norms. What guides our listening and interventions with patients that are submitted to different, even non-gender-related, body modifications? We suggest that psychoanalysts should stand outside of norms. In order to do so, they should develop a condition of supportability that will only be achieved when they are faced with their own prejudices. Through a fragment of a clinical case, we approach the limits the analyst identified in her own self as she was faced with the body changes of her patient. Afterwards, we raise some possible contemporary meanings of the various forms of body modification, and consider the fact that the body changes and transforms itself despite norms and despite ourselves. We revisit Judith Butler’s conception of gender understood as a norm that creates intelligibility. Finally, we note that to follow social, gender, and body transformations, the analyst should stand outside of norms and live as if no strangeness were ever strange to him or her.
Réseaux sociaux