The political phantasm underlying questions of gender.

Abstract

Drawing on the psychoanalytic treatment of Blu, a trans/non-binary patient, this paper introduces the notion of the political phantasm as a metapsychological operator linking unconscious phantasy to historically situated regimes of recognition. Blu's suffering is not reducible to intrapsychic or familial dynamics; rather, it calls for an expanded metapsychology capable of accounting for the co-production of subjectivity within the collective. The analytic setting becomes a space in which historically situated excitations - traumas, exclusions, excesses - are co-constructed and symbolically reworked. Blu's non-binary experience destabilizes diagnostic categories, compelling psychoanalysis to rethink its models of gender, power, and unconscious life. Clinical sequences show how family transmissions, early fantasies, and collective pre-individual ontologies co-produce what counts as livable, sayable, and desirable. The political phantasm is the processual unconscious affective-collective matrix that schematises inclusion and exclusion and, in doing so, generates spectral residues - experiences without scene that return as shame, "too-muchness", or self-pathologisation. Clinically, the concept helps avoid both intrapsychic reductionism and identity-affirmative shortcuts, while preserving the density of the unconscious and the transformative force of collective worlds.