ABSTRACT
Avgi Saketopoulou begins by noting that, historically, gender atypicality and psychopathology have been collapsed into each other, as we’ve labored under the reflexive supposition that gender variance is necessarily symptomatic of trauma or of the inability to tolerate reality. More recently, however, psychoanalytic thinkers in general and child analysts in particular have worked to question such conflations and to offer us better analytic tools toward understanding what gender wants. In this chapter, Saketopoulou draws on Loewald to show that in treating such patients, the analyst’s work requires (psychic) acts of imagination if the analyst is to hold the tensions of the mismatch between the child’s gendered somatic states and the child’s bodily materiality. Clinical material from the intensive treatment of a young transgender girl, Jenny, walks the reader through the difficult affects that can be aroused by misalignments between internal experience with the body’s contours and illustrates some of their attendant psychic/somatic fragmentations. This treatment illustrates how clinical interventions rooted in contemporary relational psychoanalysis and that keep futurity in mind can help trans children and their families.
