ABSTRACT
This discussion of Benjamin Baader’s chapter (12) focuses on his courageous and difficult journey toward transcendence, in the process discovering new ideas, thoughts, and feelings about his gender, family, and religious and spiritual life. This journey through multiple personal and historical traumas is, in part, ameliorated by Baader’s recovery of “the childish pleasure of gender playfulness” and creating space in his experience for that which had to be previously dissociated. By learning to “stand in the spaces”, Baader learns to embrace a lack of coherence and his (and ours) still-yet unfinishedness.
