Revival of the Fundamental Anthropological Situation: Supervision, Intromission, Trans*, and the Sexual1

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on conflicts stemming from the vertical and hierarchically ridden transmission of psychoanalysis through the supervision process. Drawing on a Laplanchian framework, the author argues that the intromission of violent signifiers emanating from the supervisor is liable to alter the supervisee’s idiosyncratic functions and attack their thinking activity. To illustrate this argument, the author recounts his own supervised treatment of a transgender adolescent during which the supervisor–supervisee transference lapsed into a sadomasochistic relationship and a folie-à-deux, leading to the premature termination of both the therapy and the supervision. An initial interpretation of this experience explores the theoretical bias associated with transgender subjectivities, which blinded the supervisor and made him irrationally aggressive. A second post hoc reading of this case reveals the therapist’s own blind spot: his overidentification with the patient and his ensuing need to protect the latter from pathologization. Accordingly, the failed supervision may be viewed as an attack on the third-party function linked to the patient’s psychic organization. Finally, the countertransference madness to which the therapist succumbed with his supervisor can be understood as the unbinding of repressed infantile sexuality and the reenactment of paradoxical messages intromitted to the patient’s body ego by his parents.