The monsters within and the monsters without: Gender dissidents and the future of psychoanalysis

Abstract

This paper is a response to writer, philosopher, and trans activist Paul Preciado’s 2019 presentation to 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference in Paris. There, Preciado wittily alluded to Kafka’s 1917 short story, “Report to an Academy.” In the story, an ape named Red Peter, who has learned to behave like a human, presents to an academy the story of how he achieved his transformation into an acceptable, educated European (but he is ready to pull his pants down as needed to show a bullet wound commemorating his capture). Thus, Preciado exhibited himself as a transsexual specimen like Kafka’s ape, who ironically claimed that he was as “human” as anyone in the audience. To push the metaphor further, I will invoke Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis and argue that psychoanalysis needs to undergo a mutation whose first sign might well be a sex change.