ABSTRACT
The body has begun to reclaim the central position it occupied earlier in the development of psychoanalysis. Contemporary focus on the body aims at revisiting Freud’s psychoanalytic discoveries in his work with hysterical patients. Freud constructed a theory and a technique capable of healing the rift between the body and the mind, affect and ideation. For our purposes, the body is a psychological construct; aspects of the body or somatic functions that do not achieve psychic representation do not exist. Ownership of the body and the mind, then, refers to representations that allow a transformation of the ‘bio-logic” to the “psycho-logic” (McDougall, 1995). To own, one must name. In this chapter we primarily address the pregender body.
