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.
1.Preface 2. A note about my method: subjective topology 3. Some considerations of the changing of psychoanalytic terminology 4. On constructing a psychoanalytic lexicon 5. Starting points: sex and nomination 5. Names-of-the-father: a first approach 6. : one sex 7. Psychoanalytic invariance 8. Some preliminary remarks regarding nomination 9. Maternal investment 10. Symbolic nomination and redoubling 11. The link between speech and nomination 13. The difficulty of interpretation 14. Signifiers ‘man’, ‘woman’: semblant of body 15. The psychoanalytical group 16. The discourse of the hysteric and jouissance 17. All-phallic space/non-all phallic space 18. Letters and body 19. Signifier and symptom 20. Mark in signifier 21. Sexual difference: a radical alternative 22. Return to a remark in signifier 23. Formations of voice 24. Fourth consistency 25. Assumption of nomination 26. A return to our psychoanalytical lexicon
Biography
Jennifer Yusin is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Philadelphia, Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy and Director of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Drexel University, USA.
