ABSTRACT
Central to many psychoanalytic accounts of transgender is a necessarily speculative developmental formulation of transgender that will be relevant to some but not all transgender individuals. A central assumption that informs the author's work with transgender individuals is that embodiment shapes the mind. Mind and body are inseparable. The mind is indeed inconceivable without some sort of embodiment, a notion now espoused by many. The body is a basic fact of life that supports all other psychic functions. Our body representation thus results from the internalisation of the other’s body imaginings through the unconscious transmission of gestures, posture, mannerisms, rhythms, all of which contain affectively laden representations of self-in-interaction-with-the-other. Listening to the narratives of transgender individuals at various stages of transitioning, four themes repeatedly emerge.
