Virginia Goldner

Toward a critical relational theory of gender

This article analyzes and critiques the construct of gender as a psychoanalytic and cultural category. Without succumbing to a nonpsychoanalytic notion of androgyny, the argument developed here challenges the assumption that an internally consistent gender identity is possible or even desirable. Beginning with the idea that, from an analytic perspective, the construct of “identity”; is problematic and implausible, because it denotes and privileges a unified psychic world, the author develops a deconstructionist critique of our dominant gender‐identity paradigm. It is argued that gender coherence, consistency, conformity, and identity are culturally mandated normative ideals that psychoanalysis has absorbed uncritically. These ideals, moreover, are said to create a universal pathogenic situation, insofar as the attempt to conform to their dictates requires the activation of a false‐self system. An alternative, “decentered”; gender paradigm is then proposed, which conceives of gender as a “necessary fiction...

Ironic Gender/Authentic Sex

Feminism and the postmodern turn have vaporized the commonsense materiality of gender and sexuality, both in theory and, for many, as lived experience. But where gender has moved to the ironic, sexuality still holds the space for the “authentic.” Gender now seems squarely positioned in a postmodern sensibility, but sexuality still veers between the modern and the postmodern. We can conceive and experience gender as being “made,” but sexuality retains the mark of something “found” and often, as Foucault demonstrated, of something “found out.” In an attempt to account for these divergent trajectories, the author attempts to historicize and deconstruct the categories of gender and sexuality in order to reflect on their modes of psychic action and to consider how they work with, and against, each other in mind and culture.

Trans: Gender in Free Fall

Transgender subjectivities are paradoxical in that they both undermine the gender binary and ratify it. The contradictions inherent in trans require that we consider trans as more of a process than a thing in itself, a gerund, rather than a noun or adjective, a continuous work in progress, rather than a static fact of the self. But despite cultural upheavals and increasing tolerance, we still want our gender straight up. While we approve and often applaud efforts at excellence in masculinity and femininity (including surgery) that are sex and gender concordant, we are still deeply disturbed by any efforts toward confounding that gender, or crossing over to the “other” one.

When Love Hurts: Treating Abusive Relationships

This paper describes an integrative approach for treating couples in abusive relationships. Because of the power inequities that often obtain in such cases, the therapist faces special challenges. Both partners must be defined as clients, yet the two are not on equal footing. Sustaining moral clarity in a context of such psychological ambiguity is crucial, and it requires skills beyond those we typically associate with the art and craft of the interview. A mutative factor in any therapy requires bearing witness to injustices large and small—leading the author to raise questions about the place of the moral work of psychotherapy in our therapy-saturated society. She poses an urgent social question: Is it possible to intervene therapeutically in abusive relationships to make love safer for women and less threatening to men?

Review Essay: Attachment and Eros: Opposed or Synergistic?

Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time by Stephen A. Mitchell (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2002, 224 pp.) In Can Love Last, Stephen Mitchell deconstructed the resistances—personal, metapsychological, and cultural—to sustaining vibrant and intimate sexual relationships over the long haul. This discussion is concerned with the way in which Mitchells emphasis on risk shortchanged the importance of safety in long-term romantic passion. By showing how security and dependency needs can fuel rather than dampen eros, the author proposes an alternative thesis.

Transgender Subjectivities: Introduction to Papers by Goldner, Suchet, Saketopoulou, Hansbury, Salamon & Corbett, and Harris

This issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues takes up transgender subjectivities in all of their dimensionality and complications. The papers grapple with the theoretical paradox of trans, how it both queers gender and ratifies it, while also documenting the struggles of trans persons who are trying to navigate those contradictions so as to lead a livable life. When the bodymind (Dimen, 2000) is at war with itself, there is torment. As gatekeepers, the authors of these papers consider how, and when, it is the body that has to give way.

“Let's Do It Again”: Further Reflections on Eros and Attachment

Stephen Mitchell (1997) wrote that “Psychoanalysis and the Degradation of Romance,” the paper on which the book Can Love Last was based, provoked the most feedback, both intellectual and personal, of anything he had ever written. These reverberations have continued, unabated by his passing. One of the many responses to his work in this area took the form of a 3-week International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) online symposium (March 2003), which also addressed a paper of mine, “Attachment and Eros: Opposed or Synergistic?” (Goldner, 2004) that proposed an alternative thesis about the fate of romantic love over the long term. Many on the IARPP colloquium took the position that although Mitchell and I used different intellectual strategies, our relational solution to the (apparent) opposition between attachment and eros was reductive because it occluded a full reckoning with the one-person aspects of sexuality. By contrast, my position argued that Mitchells work was reductive because he gave short shrift to the two-person aspects of romantic intimacy (especially to the importance of the third). Those primarily concerned with sexuality argued that Mitchell under estimated the foundational irreconcilability between eros and attachment, but my concern with relationality lead me to argue that he over estimated this antagonism, and I ultimately proposed a means to deconstruct this opposition altogether

The Poem as a Transformational Third: Commentary on Paper by Barbara Pizer

This commentary focuses on how psychoanalysts may theorize the therapeutic action of reading and hearing poetry. It is argued that poetic action is a densely layered one- and two-person process that achieves its psychological effects by potentiating the mental space that is “thirdness,” in Jessica Benjamins (2004) lexicon. Beginning with ideas about how poetry works on a single subjectivity, Goldner then considers the complex intersubjective and mutative processes that are set in motion when an analyst reads a poem to a patient. Building on Bollass (1987) construct, the “transformational object” and on Ogdens (1998, 1999) and Akhtars (2000) theories of poetic action, the author proposes that poetry can be usefully understood as a “transformational third.”

Talking Sex, Talking Gender—A Roundtable

This is an edited transcript of a roundtable held in the Spring of 2012, at the invitation of the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, where 4 of the most important psychoanalytic thinkers in the fields of gender and sexuality, Adrienne Harris, Virginia Goldner, Muriel Dimen, and Ken Corbett, came together to discuss the state of the field. Each of the participants prepared 1 question for each of the others. The discussion explored some of the historical areas these scholars researched as well as more current ones: the development of gender as a theoretical focus and its manifestations in social discourse now; sexual development, variance, and expression; the relations between gender and sexuality studies and the thrust of the women’s and queer liberation movements; the significance of different theoretical frameworks in understanding gender and sexuality, from traditional psychoanalytic notions to chaos theory; clinical considerations; and sexual boundary violations. This roundtable provides rare, sometimes personal, always rigorous, and illuminating snapshots of the work and the place of these minds now.

Romantic Bonds, Binds, and Ruptures: Couples on the Brink

“Bill and Jane,” a couple I saw many years ago, are placeholders for all the anguished, angry, exhausting, and poignant partners who have made their mark on my work as a clinician and theorist. They inspired and defeated me in equal measure, and they ground this essay, which attempts to bring together many of the theories I have fallen in love with over the years. Psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and systems theory, of course, but also developmental and attachment theory, Fonagy’s work on mentalization, the strategic family therapies, and containing all of these, the relational turn. I have tried to capture the intellectual synergy of putting all these discourses to work, and to work on each other, all of which is necessary when treating couples on the brink.