Clinical Conflict: A Lesson in Castration
The first time I walked into her office, I was out of breath. I had gone six whole months without really good supervision, and my early-career clinical load was starting to break me. The accumulation of all sorts of countertransferences, a vague sense that I was listening hard but for the wrong things, and the strain of my third real year in analysis had all started to set in.
I had first seen her speak on a panel about a year prior. What stuck with me was not so much what she said, but simply the way she had strutted out of the event before all the shmoozing and hobnobbing had really gotten underway—I just thought to myself, Whoa, this woman doesn't really give a fuck. I would later have a dream that put myself in this same idealized position—I was a headless body, bobbling around a classroom, totally immune to the gazes of others. To be a woman not totally ensnared, not captured by the image, would be a pretty cool thing.
Within months, I had become caught up in a transferential quagmire which seemed equally painful and productive: I was reading everything, crying about the worst maternal transferences in my analysis, trying to make sense of the sexuation graphs, and wondering why the hell my hands would hurt by the end of our sessions. I didn't feel like I was being gazed at so much as taken in, inhaled. In my own analysis I certainly worked through a lot of the material, but our supervisory relationship retained a life of its own. I wasn’t exactly an analysand of hers; I started wondering, What am I to you, anyway?
This is a generic neurotic question in some ways, and a very hysterical and transsexual question in specific ways. I hadn’t been in the field for long, but long enough to feel its benefits and see its weak spots. Benefits: I was starting to feel less hysterical. Weak spots: It often sucks for trans people. One supervisor had bizarrely flipped our roles, somehow turning me into their analyst (Did my transsexuality exert such a transferential pull so as to shake someone from their clinical stance? Was anyone in this field adult enough to work with me?); another had rather callously stated, in more or less words, that the field would always suck for someone like me, and the best I could do was buckle down.
Both hysteria and transsexuality confront authority and the signifier with a combination of doubt, dependency, and historical injury: What should I be for you to want me? Can my body add up to your words, that is, can I come to spell what you want? What do you want, anyway? The hysteric doubts the master’s authority, exposing the holes in his logic, all the while depending on him to constitute her and answer her question. A transsexual may cast doubt on the entire system of seemingly apparent sexual difference, sometimes demanding that its terms be amended, other times demanding that she be molded—quite beautifully, I might add—in its image. Transsexuality, as a refutation of assigned sex, undermines the authority of the gaze while reinscribing it: I’m not what you thought I was, but I would love to be what you want. Both the cure for hysteria and the realization of transsexuality, then, involve the clarification of desire by way of an untethering from authority. Ellie Ragland writes, “[t]he hysteric’s jouissance does not come from sex itself…but from the gaze. And the analyst’s goal is the effort at breaking up her or his representational jouissance.” To a degree this is true for many transsexual subjects, regardless of neurotic structure: Something of the concretized mass that made up what you thought it meant to be wanted has to fall away for you to be yourself.
In my case, I entered this supervision at a time when I wasn’t quite there yet. I wanted answers, and I wanted authority to make something of me without confronting the question of my own desire. I wanted to be constituted. After our first supervision, I had a dream that she was ‘really good at cutting cucumbers’—evidently, despite my already having a vagina at the time we started, there was still something I wanted her to cut off. My fantasy of being signified by her, cut by her, made by her, persisted for quite some time. It’s not just Be my mom—it’s Make me again, do this again, give me a second chance. While I never asked for it, she probably sensed it, and luckily she did none of it. The reality is that analysts need plenty of supervision, but transsexual women really don’t need any more of it than they are already dealt.
In other disciplines, I’ve had teachers try to seduce me, I’ve had teachers die suddenly, I've had teachers overreach and fall short. I’ve had teachers tell me how to make myself more legible as a man, a woman, a scholar, an artist. What I should or shouldn’t be. There is no shortage of people telling you what to do. But never had I had this sort of nothingness, this plain encounter with the question of what I wanted as an analyst, what I wanted in this encounter with the unconscious. It is an inverted sort of teaching relationship. What is offered is an absence. She once joked that my transference relationship with a certain trans woman patient was a “lesson in castration.” Did she know that’s how I felt about her?
One day I showed up a bit late, uncharacteristic of me. My life had just been turned upside down (due to circumstances completely of my own creation), and I was very anxious to appear feminine-enough that Thursday afternoon. I had squandered catching my usual train, inventing all sorts of wardrobe malfunctions at my lunch hour, and ended up in a taxi I shouldn’t have been paying for. In the week leading up to that session, I had realized that a decisive pivot in my analytic formation had occurred over the last several months, and I wanted to mark this with a fee increase from $100 to $110. My cab ordeal put me there at 1:11pm, and the month I came out to the world years ago was, in fact, the eleventh month of November.
This staging of the revelatory moment, the mirror-moment, the debut moment, is of course ubiquitous in trans memoir and storytelling, but it was very important that I could play it out subconsciously with her for quite some time, without her interpreting it or necessarily brushing it off. She didn’t pry, but if there was something in the transference I wanted to talk about, she let me. She didn’t signify me either, and in one of our most important sessions shortly thereafter, she gave me a critique that was rare in its bitingness: She plainly called it a technical error that I had used the signifier “trans” with a trans child in a certain analytic moment. The child was in immense pain, and in my heightened countertransferential identification, I had made an attempt to soothe which only made matters worse; I had used a word that referred to my pain, but not necessarily to the child’s. I saw that my supervisor was encouraging me to take the stance with the child that she was taking with me all along: Not signifying what a subject is or isn’t, but providing one of the few spaces where there is an absence of such brutal significatory power.
The cis/trans fissure between us, in my mind, broke down over time. On the subject of countertransference and being the object of feminized projections, she once said, “We certainly have different life experiences, but for me, there’s something particular about having grown up with all sorts of gendered projections being put onto me, and then coming to work, and having people project their gendered stuff onto me hour after hour, day after day.” The wound prepares you for its future contours. And in terms of our relationship, I started to see that difference between women doesn’t have to mean distance between women. She started to feel less far away.
The cure for hysteria, the softening of how the world hardens transsexuals, and perhaps even the formation of an analyst thus lies in the steady acceptance of disjuncture; your words, my body, your gaze, my voice. We splinter towards a new becoming. Perhaps what I learned from her was to gaze not in search of a totality, a fantasy of capturing a patient as diagnostically whole at any given moment, but a gaze that stares beyond and through these mirages into the vicissitudes of speech, affect, sex, and discordance. Transsexually speaking, there is really no going back once you glimpse this beyond, that a life beyond these mythologized totalities is possible. This very lack in everything we hold up to the light, it makes good sex and sexuation possible. Every diagnostic fails, every image falls. We are left with but a kernel, a vanishing point where our desire catches only the imprint of an ember.
We more recently exchanged emails. I was frustrated and on a roll, trying to pinpoint where exactly transness might reside on the level of fundamental fantasy. “I think you're right that the fundamental fantasy is one of being objectified correctly,” she wrote back, “—and, the thing about fundamental fantasies is that they get traversed. It is impossible to be signified correctly, and something of traversing the fantasy means realizing you can be any sort of subject you want to be, whatever's happening in the other's gaze.” I think my initial impression of her was correct. In working with her gazeless gaze week after week, year after year, I found a resting place, in my subjecthood, in my position as an analyst: That I can keep on being, keep on desiring, keep on throwing words together and letting them break apart when they will. There is a grief in mourning an ideal—of being a perfect woman, a perfect analyst—and a freedom in moving beyond its confines.
A lesson in castration: As a pure articulation of the function of the analyst, receiving—within the confines and limits of each person who takes up the semblance of the analyst—is what we do. For a long time, there was much I had to say to her. Reduced to the pure nothing of this function, as we approached our end, she suddenly seemed to be only and exactly what she started as: Who I needed her to be. Her gift was this pure nothing—an ethical holding, but never too tightly, a transmission of the love which bears witness in the analytic act.