An adolescent’s demand for support in undertaking medical transitioning goes against traditional psychoanalytic theories. In this article, the author gives an overview of the metaphors that occur most frequently in discussions about gender transitioning. Through the notions of contagion, naturalness of gender, and amputation, he will attempt to reveal the anxieties of analysts, on the one hand, and, on the other, the anxieties of the psychoanalysis as a theoretical field.
Traumatic experience in childhood can result in the establishment by the psyche of primitive defensive strategies for confronting the dangerousness of the linking.
Through the story of « Diana », we will see how a paradoxical dynamic can be set up in adolescence between the search for erotic linkings and the attack on these linkings, the goal of which is to eliminate all need for these linkings.
The clinical treatment of « dangerous liaisons » consists in the adolescents’ search for partners whose distinguishing characteristic would be that they maintain and repeat the deficiencies and traumas linked to the earliest environment. Paradoxically, these liaisons perform the defensive function of protecting the adolescent against genuinely loving linkings, which are perceived as much more dangerous because of the underlying threat of dependence.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7