L’identité de genre en psychiatrie, une filiation oubliée ?

Abstract

From the observation of the debates around sex and gender that have taken place in France since the beginning of this century, the article questions the place of the American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller. By recalling some facts that marked his reception in France at the end of the 1970s, we question his presence within his profession and the opportunity for contemporary French psychiatrists to incorporate his intellectual orientations and conceptions. The expression «gender identity» is now well known and widely used, and Stoller was one of the first to use it. To welcome Stoller is not to welcome the philosopher Judith Butler, even though these two figures are sometimes (strangely) associated. Beyond the debates that the concept of gender continues to provoke and the troubles that it arouses within the professions related to the brain, it is an opportunity for its representatives to question the social role of psychiatry and its capacity to formulate a new pact between society and itself. Incorporating the gender issues can also be an opportunity to test the relevance of a conceptual tool or even to contribute to reformulating the reception and consideration by mental health services of people affected by the expression of their sexual identity.