A Psychoanalytic Approach to Sexual Difference

A Psychoanalytic Approach to Sexual Difference analyses the concepts of sex and gender, showing how sexual difference is characterised 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 analyses Freud and Lacan’s work on feminine sexuality and Winnicott’s notion of the transitional object, as well as 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 in order 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 and mental health practitioners in the trans field, as well as for academics working in gender theory, queer and trans studies, and feminist philosophies.