The Controversial Report
On Paul Preciado’s Can the Monster Speak?
hannah baer
As a psychologist in training, trans woman, and social justice educator, I sometimes speak to groups of cis mental health practitioners in academic settings about competency providing mental healthcare for trans people. I do this work relying less on tools I learned through studying and debating theory, and more by drawing on what I try to do as an organizer. Instead of attempting to appear impressive or clever, I aim to connect emotionally, with the goal of fomenting meaningful individual and cultural change.
I am not sure what Paul B. Preciado believed his task to be when he was asked to speak at a school of Lacanian analysts as part of a conference on women in psychoanalysis. I am also not sure how his original understanding of his task changed when his talk was delivered—he describes being heckled and cut off before he finished—or when he chose afterward to publish the full text of the talk in book form. The book itself provides a beautiful and incisive history of clinical and psychoanalytic thought on the history of gender variance; at the same time, as a record of a transformative intervention on transphobia in mental healthcare, its efficacy is debatable.
Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts opens with a single page describing what happened when Preciado delivered his address. He reports that the speech “triggered an earthquake,” though what exactly this means is unclear. He indicates that he was laughed at and called names. Understandably, Preciado seems to feel disempowered in his role as a speaker; he had been invited to share his knowledge with an audience, but rather than be witnessed and enfranchised, he was mocked and booed.
What about the audience, the eponymous academy of psychoanalysts? The École de la Cause freudienne, a psychoanalytic institute, was formed by Jacques Lacan in 1981, after the dissolution of the École Freudienne de Paris. In trying to understand the history of this split myself, I admittedly became quite confused; it seems that as many as twenty different cadres were formed following the initial collapse. As far as I can tell, the venue where Preciado spoke is understood generally as the foremost Lacanian institute in France today. The tendency toward rift is more common in psychoanalytic organizations than a lay person might presume. Thomas Kohut, son of famed analyst Heinz Kohut, writes that “[his] father used to joke: ‘What happens when two psychoanalysts get together?’ ‘They form an institute!’ ‘And what happens next?’ ‘They split, and form two institutes!’
In other words, Preciado is giving a speech to an institution with a highly conflictual history, situated in a wider field where—despite a stated interest in and profusion of literature around developing insight around that which is split off, rejected, and disavowed—the experts seem prone to splitting off, rejecting, and disavowing. The audience reacted to Preciado in exactly this way; he describes the group as having “split” in the aftermath of his talk. Perhaps his account of the audience’s reaction indicates a sense of what he hoped to do—namely, create an undeniable schism in a field that he believes is dysfunctional and in need of change.
In the book, Preciado notes that he himself has been in analysis for seventeen years, and lists the various schools of thought to which his analysts subscribed. He writes:
“To begin with, it would be impossible for me to qualify my multiple experiences of analysis with a single adjective, either good or bad. The success or failure of my analytic sessions largely depended not on the fidelity of the analysts to Freud, Klein or Lacan, but, on the contrary, on their infidelity, or, to put it another way, on their creativity, their ability to step outside the ‘cage.’ Over the course of different sessions, I was able to observe how my analysts had to struggle with, and against, the theoretical framework in which they had been trained in order to be able to listen to a non-binary ‘trans’ person without bringing up diagnosis, critique, conversion or cure.”
Preciado elegantly summarizes the admittedly brutal history of psychoanalysis and gender. Much of what he documents I first encountered in a paper by Patricia Gherovici, “Psychoanalysis Needs a Sex Change,” which traces the medical and psychiatric development of the idea of transsexuality in Western Europe and the United States. Yet Gherovici’s account differs from Preciado’s. As an analyst and an American Lacanian, Gherovici wants to advance the discipline and expresses sympathy toward its leading figures and their historically limited views. Preciado, meanwhile, wants to shred the discipline, to blow it apart. He writes:
“On the one hand, the majority of those who refused to live according to the patriarchal norms of sexual difference were persecuted by the police and the judicial system as potentially criminal, and on the other, they were pathologized by the psychiatric and psychoanalytical framework, locked in psychiatric prisons, raped in order to prove their true “femininity” or “masculinity,” subjected to lobotomies, hormone therapy, electroconvulsive therapy or the so-called “analytical cure.” … Many of my predecessors died and continue to die to this day, murdered, raped, beaten, incarcerated, medicalized ... or they lived or are living their difference in secret. This is my heritage, and it is with the strength that I draw from all their silenced voices, though in my own name only, that I address you today.”
Near the end of the book (ostensibly never spoken aloud during his engagement, due to the aforementioned booing off the stage), Preciado moves toward a statement of purpose:
“We urgently need clinical practice to transition. This cannot happen without a revolutionary mutation in psychoanalysis, and a critical challenge of its patriarchal-colonial presuppositions. A transition in clinical practice would entail a shift in position: the object of study becomes the subject, while the person who, until now, has been the subject agrees to submit to a process of study, questioning and experimentation. The former subject agrees to change. The subject/object duality (both clinically and epistemologically) disappears and is replaced by a new relationship, one that conjointly leads to mutation and to becoming other. It will be about strength and mutation rather than power and knowledge. It will entail learning together, and healing our wounds, abandoning the techniques of violence and devising a new approach to the reproduction of life on a planetary scale.”
For someone who repeatedly positions himself as alienated from his audience, suggesting that they can’t or won’t fully witness him, this is a rather sanguine conclusion. Notably, Preciado doesn’t use this moment to recognize or lift up the voices of contemporary analysts who are actually doing the critical work he is calling for.
*
I found it hard, when quoting Preciado, to quote succinctly. He writes long winding paragraphs that curlicue around his main idea. He himself alludes to his long-windedness in the opening of Can the Monster Speak?. He notes that “the organizers reminded me that my allocated time had run out, I tried to speed up, skipped several paragraphs, I managed to read only a quarter of my prepared speech.” The first time I read this, I took it to mean that he had been slighted by the organizers of the event. Upon rereading, it occurred to me that perhaps he had attempted to deliver a talk that took four times as long to share as the time he had been allotted. It’s not totally clear. It’s not the only part of the text where, especially upon rereading, I wondered how exactly to interpret his position of grievance.
In Can the Monster Speak?, he compares himself to a number of figures, starting with Red Peter, an ape kidnapped from Africa who learns how to speak and gives a lecture to a hall of scientists in a story by Kafka. Preciado, from what he calls over and over again the “cage” of his trans body, also compares himself to Galileo, Freud, Frankenstein’s monster, a migrant, a child, a cow, and the professor in Money Heist. He seems to feel disempowered by his audience and at the same time to wish to elevate himself above them and speak downward. At times this grandiose voice is seductive and the images are elegant. It can also feel a bit clueless.
“The trans body is Africa; its organs, though living, speak in languages unknown to the colonizer, they have dreams that you, psychoanalysts, are unaware of,” Preciado declares, apparently unaware that, being a white masculine person who was educated at an Ivy League school and is now a widely read theorist, comparing himself to Africa is, at best, slightly cringe. This is not a one-time thing. Preciado repeatedly aligns himself in the text with people and places subjugated to extreme forms of literal violence as a way of characterizing the relation between him and his audience. He acknowledges his own Ivy League credentials, but stops short of naming the fact that he has an extremely rare kind of privilege, that of a public intellectual, someone whose appointed—and in his case, celebrated—role in society is to speak freely about his thinking. It is righteous, I think, for people with the kind of access that Preciado has to attempt to bring the voices of subjugated people into spaces where they may otherwise be unheard. For him to identify, fully and with minimal caveats, as being represented by colonized continents and peoples struck me as politically questionable. My sense is that it is incumbent upon white trans people with professional-managerial–class credentials to leverage their power, rather than to minimize it in order to sound more righteous.
In 2017, one of the more challenging and self-hating periods of my life in terms of my own transition and mental health, I asked my psychodynamic psychotherapist, who was also trans, if he thought I was suffering from narcissism. I had been having conversations at the time with a friend about one of their family members who monologued about himself constantly, and I was feeling like I had become similarly narcissistic in my depression, anxiety, and dysphoria, a long-talking self-absorbed parody of a wounded adult person. My therapist replied generously that he thought I was not suffering from pathological narcissism, but that I did have narcissistic defenses, ways of intensely focusing on myself when I was in pain that could be healing in some ways and create problems in others. I channel this side of myself, the side that wants to talk and talk, into my writing, which is also personal, creative. I attempt to channel other parts of myself when I am practicing therapy or teaching.
The part of me that is a compassionate therapist wants to understand Preciado’s braggadocio as self-protective, a narcissistic defense, puffing one’s chest up to a room of people who may find you to be some combination of ridiculous and appalling. A stranger on the internet recently wrote to me about working to overcome “transpessimism,” a position she characterized by “a constant defensiveness that is so utterly draining.” I see this defensiveness in Preciado’s stance, a righteous anger born out of real grievance, overflowing.
The part of me that is a writer feels some embarrassment, stemming from my own shame around the ways I may appear grandiose or self-congratulatory in my writing. I don’t like or feel proud of the part of me that wants a lot of attention and validation for saying my ideas in public, and I sometimes feel averse toward other people who I sense share this tendency. This part of me wants to dunk on Preciado for being arrogant; if I can distance myself from him, maybe I can redeem myself from my own shame, eliminate the stink of my own bloviating white-trans-cultural-privilege-falsely-aligned-with-the-marginalized persona. I feel in my discomfort the ways I am turned off by how Preciado speaks at times, and also the ways I feel drawn toward him. I have also experienced transphobia in psychodynamic establishment spaces, and there’s something powerful about seeing someone claim that experience.
The part of me that is a teacher or activist, admittedly one with a psychodynamic lens, feels that Can the Monster Speak? plays out the tropes of oppositionality between marginalized queer people and the psychoanalytic establishment without taking on more deeply the issue of what transformation could look like. Preciado seems to dare his audience to take him seriously as the first step toward changing their perspective, to see him as an expert. I wonder what it would look like if he had more deeply elaborated on his invitation to his audience to enter into a “new relationship” (which he invokes only in his closing) between the psychoanalytic establishment and queer people.
Perhaps Preciado would find too soft or too generous my stance toward the analytic establishment. After describing his transition (including a piercing description of how his memory of life as a woman lives on in his body today), he moves on to a once again questionable comparison between trans people (and implicitly himself) and the ravaged ecologies of the Amazon and the Potosí silver mines, and then finishes by declaring: “I would rather make of my life a literary legend, a biopolitical show, than allow psychiatry, pharmacology, psychoanalysis, medicine or the media to construct an image of me as an educated binary, integrationist homosexual or transsexual, as a sophisticated monster capable of expressing myself in the language of the norm, ladies and gentlemen, academics and psychoanalysts.”
I may be more integrationist than Preciado, myself a clinician and at times experimenting with my capability to use “the language of the norm.” That said, for me, his confrontational tone fell somewhat flat. Trans and queer issues are centered at the most prestigious psychoanalytic institutes in New York City, where I live, and while not free of ignorance or fetishizing/careerist fascination, the leaders in these places generally seem committed to engaging with the brutal history of their own discipline. The Abigail Shriers of the therapy world notwithstanding, there are many well-meaning if slightly clumsy champions of queer liberation in the coastal U.S. psychoanalytic establishment.
Admittedly, Preciado seems to be talking to a group of analysts with a different and more conservative set of commitments than what I’m exposed to. My sense from talking to friends is that in clinical spaces in Europe, the discourse around gender and queerness is severely retrograde relative to certain parts of the United States. His account of being treated psychoanalytically by providers who insist on pathologizing him also sounds incredibly painful (he only touches on it briefly in the section I quoted above). It’s in stark contrast to my experience, two decades his junior and on the opposite side of the Atlantic, getting to choose between various trans and queer psychoanalytic practitioners when I’m seeking mental healthcare. It is also hard to tell what exactly is going on with Preciado’s audience, based on the text itself.
I suspect readers who are interested in baroque, spiraling accounts of the meaning of trans existence and identity—and diatribes against the cis establishment—will take solace in this engaging and provocative book. For the small-minded, politically conservative psychoanalysts Preciado fears he is addressing, I wonder whether such a reader would hear the author’s nuanced ideas about trans identity through the clatter of his bombast. For therapists and theorists of mental health with allegiances to queer and trans freedom, Preciado demonstrates that we have much to be upset about but is less clear as to what we should do next.