The Queerness of Psychoanalysis

The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond is an exploration of psychoanalysis’ often complicated and fraught history with thinking about queerness, as well as its multifaceted heritage.

Throughout the chapters, the contributors write about psychoanalysis’ relationship with queerness, the ways in which queerness is represented in the psychoanalytic archive, and how that archive endures in the present and creates various disruptive effects both within and beyond the clinic. Each chapter from the global cohort of contributors approaches queerness from a different angle: they consider the literary aspects of queerness’ presence in the analytic world; the clinical complexities of working with queer and trans people; metapsychological inclusion and exclusion of queerness, and many other subjects. Taken together these contributions constitute a decisive intervention into the psychoanalytic canon. They are an unabashed demand for accepting and furthering the representation and inclusion of queer, and in particular trans, people within psychoanalysis. It is a call for action to utilize and deepen psychoanalysis’ enormous explicatory powers and bring together voices that have so far been denied a unity of expression, while critically reevaluating psychoanalysis’ historical relationship to queerness. Each chapter proposes different ways of thinking and writing psychoanalytically, with many of the papers queering the format and forms of expression commonly found in academic writing, through their use of dialogues, conversations, or other experimental forms of writing.

Written almost exclusively by analysts, scholars, and activists who identify as trans and/or queer, this important volume puts theory into practice by centering queer and trans voices.

Vanessa Sinclair is a psychoanalyst based in Sweden, who works with people internationally. She is the host of Rendering Unconscious Podcast and a founding member of Das Unbehagen: A Free Association for Psychoanalysis. She sits on the International Advisory Board of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society and is an Editorial Advisor for Parapraxis magazine. Dr. Sinclair is the author of Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art: The Cut in Creation (Routledge, 2021) and the editor of Psychoanalytic Perspectives on the Films of Ingmar Bergman: From Freud to Lacan and Beyond (Routledge, 2023) and On Psychoanalysis and Violence: Contemporary Lacanian Perspectives (Routledge, 2019) with Manya Steinkoler.

Elisabeth Punzi is a licensed psychologist and a lecturer at the Department of Psychology at Gothenburg University, Sweden. She leads a project concerning heritage and health at the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, Gothenburg University and teaches psychoanalytic theory, psychology of religion, qualitative research methods, and many other topics.

Myriam Sauer is a PhD candidate at the Latin-America Institute of Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany, as well as a writer and poet. Her primary academic interests lie in the fields of psychoanalysis, queer studies, literature, and sociology.