Sexual Difference

Sexual Difference
Author: Stephen Frosh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 164
Release: 1994
Genre: Identification (Psychology)
ISBN: 0415068444

This critical exploration of issues of gender in psychoanalysis acknowledges and updates the complexity of theory and writing in this area, particularly the way sexual differences can only be thought about from a gendered position.

Transgender Psychoanalysis

Transgender Psychoanalysis
Author: Patricia Gherovici
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2017-07-14
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317594177

Drawing on the author’s clinical work with gender-variant patients, Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference argues for a depathologizing of the transgender experience, while offering an original analysis of sexual difference. We are living in a "trans" moment that has become the next civil rights frontier. By unfixing our notions of gender, sex, and sexual identity, challenging normativity and essentialisms, trans modalities of embodiment can help reorient psychoanalytic practice. This book addresses sexual identity and sexuality by articulating new ideas on the complex relationship of the body to the psyche, the precariousness of gender, the instability of the male/female opposition, identity construction, uncertainties about sexual choice—in short, the conundrum of sexual difference. Transgender Psychoanalysis features explications of Lacanian psychoanalysis along with considerations on sex and gender in the form of clinical vignettes from Patricia Gherovici's practice as a psychoanalyst. The book engages with popular culture and psychoanalytic literature (including Jacques Lacan’s treatments of two transgender patients), and implements close readings uncovering a new ethics of sexual difference. These explorations have important implications not just for clinicians in psychoanalysis and mental health practitioners but also for transgender theorists and activists, transgender people, and professionals in the trans field. Transgender Psychoanalysis promises to enrich ongoing discourses on gender, sexuality, and identity.

A Psychoanalytic Approach to Sexual Difference

A Psychoanalytic Approach to Sexual Difference
Author: Jennifer Yusin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 105
Release: 2023-12-12
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1003822436

A Psychoanalytic Approach to Sexual Difference analyzes the concepts of sex and gender, showing how sexual difference is characterized by ongoing transformations of spatiality and body, and of essentiality and normativity. In this book, Jennifer Yusin presents a psychoanalytic study that engages with clinical cases, philosophies of sex and gender, and psychoanalytic writings about sexual difference. She deftly and accessibly analyzes Freud’s and Lacan’s work on feminine sexuality, Winnicott’s notion of the transitional object, and theories of sexuality and gender developed by Judith Butler and Monique Wittig, among others. Yusin starts with the question of how the lack of any essential definition of sexual difference affects subjectivity. She places an emphasis on the psychoanalytic experience and its effects upon how a subject experiences the difference between being a body and having a body. Following Lacan’s discovery of the Borromean knot structure of the unconscious and the work of the psychoanalyst Jean-Gérard Bursztein, Yusin continues developing subjective topology as a methodology. She also introduces and shows how sexual difference is linked to transformations of sex and body. Through this, Yusin highlights how it is necessary to reformulate sex, gender, and sexual identities in psychoanalytic theories and in the practice of psychoanalysis. She also speaks to the necessity of generating a new lexicon to help analysts speak about sexual difference in ways that do not perpetuate any essentialism or normativity on the topic. This book is essential reading for clinicians in psychoanalysis, mental health practitioners in the trans field, and academics working in gender theory, queer and trans studies, and feminist philosophies.

Sexual Difference

Sexual Difference
Author: Stephen Frosh
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2002-09-11
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1134915918

Sexual Difference is a critical exploration of psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference. In particular it explores the way in which masculinity is expressed in theory and practice. Developing from the unsettling impact of these issues on the author's own professional practice, Stephen Frosh examines how the very language and structure of psychoanalysis are loaded with assumptions about gender. Employing both Kleinian and Lacanian theoretical perspectives this book critically examines these approacheds to sexial difference. In addition, it discusses the application of these issues in the practice of treating sexual violence and in cases of child secual abuse. Sexual Difference will be of value to all trainees and professionals in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, psychology and social work, as well as all those with an interest in `masculinity', `femininity' and their effects.

The Difficulty of Difference

The Difficulty of Difference
Author: D. N. Rodowick
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2014-01-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1317928547

This book argues that serious misreadings of Freud and Lacan on sexual difference have characterized prevailing models of psychoanalytic film criticism. In critiquing theories of identification and female spectatorship, the author maintains that early film theorists and feminist critics are equally guilty of imposing a binary conception of sexual difference on Freud’s thought. By embracing such a rigid definition of male/female difference, they fail to understand the fundamentally complex and fluid process of sexual identification as it is articulated in Freud’s writing, constructed in film texts, and negotiated by spectators. The book turns to Freud’s work on fantasy to develop an alternative model for interpreting sexuality in the visual and narrative arts, one that emphasizes a ‘politics of critical reading’ over accepted theories of ideological identification. Originally published in 1991, its strategic focus on psychoanalysis itself as an object of historical and critical inquiry, and not simply as a reading method is the unique quality of this book.

Like Subjects, Love Objects

Like Subjects, Love Objects
Author: Jessica Benjamin
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780300074307

In this important book, a well-known psychoanalyst and feminist makes a case for what she calls "gender heterodoxy"-a highly original view of the similarities and differences between the sexes-and, in the process, illuminates aspects of love, sexuality, aggression, and pornography.

The Difficulty of Difference

The Difficulty of Difference
Author: D. N. Rodowick
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2014-01-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1317928555

This book argues that serious misreadings of Freud and Lacan on sexual difference have characterized prevailing models of psychoanalytic film criticism. In critiquing theories of identification and female spectatorship, the author maintains that early film theorists and feminist critics are equally guilty of imposing a binary conception of sexual difference on Freud’s thought. By embracing such a rigid definition of male/female difference, they fail to understand the fundamentally complex and fluid process of sexual identification as it is articulated in Freud’s writing, constructed in film texts, and negotiated by spectators. The book turns to Freud’s work on fantasy to develop an alternative model for interpreting sexuality in the visual and narrative arts, one that emphasizes a ‘politics of critical reading’ over accepted theories of ideological identification. Originally published in 1991, its strategic focus on psychoanalysis itself as an object of historical and critical inquiry, and not simply as a reading method is the unique quality of this book.

Gender and Sexuality

Gender and Sexuality
Author: Chris Beasley
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2005-05-20
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780761969792

About various theories of gender, sexuality, feminism and masculinity including queer theory, transgender theorizing, modernist liberationism and social constructionism.

The Emptiness of the Image

The Emptiness of the Image
Author: Parveen Adams
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1135081115

There has long been a politics around the way in which women are represented, with objection not so much to specific images as to a regime of looking which places the represented woman in a particular relationship to the spectator's gaze. Artists have sometimes avoided the representation of women altogether, but they are now producing images which challenge the regime. How do these images succeed in their challenge ? The Emptiness of the Image offers a psychoanalytic answer. Parveen Adams argues that, despite flaws in some of the details of its arguments, psychoanalytic theory retains an overwhelming explanatory strength in relation to questions of sexual difference and representation. She goes on to show how the issue of desire changes the way we can think of images and their effects. Throughout she discusses the work of theorists, artists and filmmakers such as Helene Deutsch, Catherine MacKinnon, Mary Kelly, Francis Bacon, Michael Powell and Della Grace. The Emptiness of the Image shows how the very space of representation can change to provide a new way of thinking the relation between the text and the spectator. It shows how psychoanalytic theory is supple enough to slide into and transform the most unexpected situations.

Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory

Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory
Author: Nancy J. Chodorow
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1989-01-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780300173376

Essays discuss the relations among gender, self, and society, the significance of women's mothering for gender personality and gender relations, and how the psychodynamics of gender create and sustain individualism