ABSTRACT
In her 2012 book Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis, Balsam argued that psychoanalysis in the USA abandoned the psychological potentials of the material body, because the prevalent ego psychology was still in the dark ages in relation to women. “American psychoanalysis,” she said, “had abandoned prematurely the continuing exploration Freud had begun of the body as a central psychic focus.” Building on this, in the current chapter the author focuses on the intriguingly flexible genders that are enacted in life now, so much more freely than even just a few years ago. Especially given the myriad technological and social changes that impact the body, she writes about their relation to the psychic representation of individuals’ bodies. Balsam observes that the ascent of relational theories has brought about a descent in the importance of the material body. In light of this, she explores essential questions: Where does the natal material body currently stand in dilemmas about flexible genders and also transgender roles and enactments? What does it mean to include active sex behaviors in gendered expressions that operate in progressive intimate partnerships? Where does the vitality of the body’s natally endowed reproductivity become channeled, if unexpressed or inexpressible within a gender portrait that is born “she,” but subsequently self-labeled “he”/“they”/ “ze”? (The same question goes for the natal “he”). And where does the material body or the altered material body place itself in debates about parenting and modeling internalization for the sex and gender patterns of nurtured children?
