Abstract
JAPA 67/1, our first issue of 2019, is dedicated to new writing on the psychoanalytic body. These essays and original papers all engage key questions regarding gender and sexuality, as well as aspects of embodied experience within psychoanalytic treatment. For some time now, JAPA has published papers pushing the boundaries of classical psychoanalytic theorizing on these matters and putting into question seemingly foundational binaries regarding gendered positions and sexual object choice (see, e.g., Saketopoulou 2014; Hansbury 2017). No doubt this publishing history redounds to our readers’ benefit, as we continue to receive creative and compelling submissions that fall under this broad category. Over the past year, as the essays and papers you are about to read went through our peer-review process, we gradually realized that we had a critical mass of outstanding work that, if brought together, would make for a thought-provoking and memorable JAPA issue. We wish to thank the authors for their efforts. We are also fortunate to have four commentators, Adrienne Harris, Patricia Gherovici, Jonathan House, and Marilia Aisenstein, whose outstanding contributions to psychoanalytic scholarship are well-known to many of our readers.
We begin 67/1 with Rosemary Balsam’s essay, “On the Natal Body and Its Confusing Place in Mental Life.” As her title suggests, Balsam takes the reader through some key moments in the intellectual history of psychoanalytic theorizing on the body and describes its uncertain (i.e., “confused”) status in contemporary thinking about it. There is one fact, she asserts, about which there should be no confusion: what she calls “the programmed procreative potential of our natal bodies” (pp. 17–18): Why, she asks, might we not want to recognize this fact? Balsam offers a complex and penetrating answer to this question.
In “‘The Skin Is the Cradle of the Soul’: Didier Anzieu on the Skin-ego, Boundaries, and Boundlessness,” Andrzej Werbart presents an extensive and detailed exposition of a psychoanalytic theorist whose work is perhaps not well known to many JAPA readers and certainly deserves wider consideration and exposure. Werbart’s essay, in addition to helping us to know more about Anzieu’s valuable contributions, has surprising relevance in the present sociopolitical moment, in which the status of borders and boundaries is being contested and reexamined.
In the first of four original papers, Francisco González pursues the question of the relationship between sexual desire and gender transformation in the life of trans man Lou Sullivan. In this paper, which won the Ralph Roughton Award for 2017, González emphasizes the ways in which Sullivan wrote his way—via extensive diary entries—into new forms of subjective experience, and questions an overly discrete theoretical separation of gender and sexuality. Adrienne Harris offers a commentary.
Next, in “The Half Embrace of Psychic Bisexuality,” Rajiv Gulati and David Pauley explore Freud’s foundational notion of bisexuality and show how to this day many analysts struggle with the full implications of this idea. They critique recent psychoanalytic work on gender and sexuality that unwittingly reinforces cisgendered, heteronormative biases. Patricia Gherovici offers a commentary.
In “The Draw to Overwhelm: Consent, Risk, and the Retranslation of Enigma,” Avgi Saketopoulou continues her important work on gender, sexuality, and the body. In this paper, using key ideas from Laplanche and clinical (as well as extraclinical) vignettes, she argues for a new psychoanalytic concept referring to a specifically human experience, that of “overwhelm.” Saketopoulou also fruitfully explores the difference between two kinds of consent: informed consent and limit consent. Jonathan House offers a commentary.
And finally, Kathryn Zerbe continues her work on psychosomatic phenomena with her paper, “The Secret Life of Secrets: Deleterious Psychosomatic Effects on Patient and Analyst.” Here Zerbe explores the effects of secret-keeping not only on the secret-keeper, but also on the analyst as she works intensively with such patients. Zerbe’s description of “somatic countertransference” is one of several original ideas in this paper. Marilia Aisenstein offers a commentary.