Deconstructing difference: Gender, splitting, and transitional space

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Abstract
Apparently a straightforward elaboration of anatomical difference, “gender”; is symbolically tied to many kinds of cultural representations, which, in turn, set the terms not only for understanding the relations between women and men but for organizing self‐experience. Consequently, problems of self may come to be coded in terms of gender, and those of gender, in terms of the self. Using a clinical example, I speak of gender less as a determinate category than as something resembling a force field, that is, as a set of complex and shifting relations among multiple contrasts or differences. This multiplicity, in turn, generates some technical recommendations about gender and splitting. Recapturing split‐off parts of the self therefore requires inhabiting its transitional spaces, including that in which gender is not a given but is in question. Moreover, I suggest, counterintuitively, that gender identity both seals the package of self and preserves all the self must lose and thus bridges undifferentiated archaic depths and selfhood. In transference and countertransference, both patient and analyst must also enter this paradoxical space, where they alternate between being gendered and being gender‐free.

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