In this presentation, the speaker delves into the challenges faced by the analyst when confronted with atypically gendered analysands. He thus focuses on what he calls “psychoanalytic dysphoria” as opposed to the suffering stemming from a gender assignment that is incompatible with the lived experience of some individuals who identify as trans or non-binary. First, the analyst’s discomfort with trans is deemed to be symptomatic of a range of epistemological problems, such as the resistance of traditional psychoanalysis towards the concept of gender, the fetishization of anatomical sex difference or the reductive meaning of psychic bisexuality and the après-coup. The author further underscores the insufficient working-through of countertransference, the rekindling of infantile sexuality by the hybridity of trans bodies, as well as the unprocessed anxieties of formlessness and breakup of personal continuity that circulate in the transference behind the mask of the masculine and the feminine. The speaker finally argues that the binary discourse regarding trans can be understood at light of the archaic mechanism of splitting into “good” and “bad”, as well as an amplifying group effect, that is, an ossification of beliefs, biases, and positions within historically opposed factions(representatives of majority norms versus representatives of minority norms).

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this presentation participants will be able to:

1. Expand their knowledge on counter-transference.
2. Understand the implications of psychoanalytic theories to the distorted listening of gender diverse patients.
3. Identify the primary anxieties and death-associated elements related to gender.
4. Comprehend the mechanisms underlying the binary discourse regarding trans identities.

Nicolas Evzonas, PhD

Nicolas Evzonas (PhD in Literature and PhD in Psychopathology and Psychoanalysis) is a Greek Cypriot Paris-based therapist in private practice. He is a candidate to the French Psychoanalytical Association (APF, IPA) and Associate Professor with tenure in Clinical Psychology at the University of Paris. Nicolas has written numerous papers on clinical and applied psychoanalysis published in Greek, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan peer-reviewed journals, as well as essays on films, theatre, and literature. He is the author of the French book Devenirs trans de l’analyste [Trans Becomings of the Analyst], which is currently being translated in four European languages. He is also co-editor of the Psychoanalytic Inquiry issue on “Sexualities, Gender, Class, and Race: A Psychoanalytic View from France” (2020) and editor of a double special issue of The Psychoanalytic Review on “Trans* Becomings and Countertransference” (2021 & 2022). His latest projects are a guest-edited French-based issue for Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2023) on perversion and a forthcoming edited volume on Trauma and Sexuality (2026), which gathers together psychoanalytic clinicians and scholars from all over the world.