GSF Graduate Scholars Colloquium - Transitioning to the Couch

Speaker: Julien Fischer, PhD Candidate Respondent: Veronica Davis

RSVP to ls341@duke.edu by Sept. 5 for advance reading materials

Over the last thirty years, the field of Transgender
Studies has articulated its emergence through a
steadfast critique of medicine and its approach to
treating gender variance. Given its enmeshment with
medicine in the U.S., it is little surprise that
psychoanalysis has been included under the purview of
the field's critique. What is more, psychoanalysis has
tended to pathologize trans phenomena and
experience. One consequence of these apparent
incompatibilities has been that Transgender Studies
tends to either ignore or reject psychoanalytic practice
and theory while embracing a self-conscious and selfaware
trans narrator as its central object of inquiry.
Drawing on the medical genealogy of the trans
autobiographical mandate and the work of a small
contingent of psychoanalytic Transgender Studies
scholars, "Transitioning to the Couch" proposes that
revisiting the encounter between Transgender Studies
and psychoanalysis harbors the potential to trouble the
conundrums of trans pathologization and to move
toward the possibility of theorizing the trans person as
a divided subject of the unconscious.