Adolescent Feminine Subjectivities Elaborated via Transitory Objects Created in the Analytic Field

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper will consider the challenges adolescents, their families, and their psychoanalysts face when approaching the feminine/masculine theme. Adolescent sexual relationships co-construct and constitute versions of the feminine and the masculine. Such narratives of gender are compromise formations, which include overdetermined normativities and yet are idiographic and embodied. Conformity to cultural expectations leads to comprehensibility, but threatens the unique and the personal. We will consider clinical material from a fourteen-year-old girl who came into therapy because her mother considered her behavior towards her twin brother too aggressive. The family culture brought to the therapy expectations about the behavior of a young girl. What was important in this therapy was a setting with the use of different materials to build artistic objects. The presenting issue of the real relationship between sister and brother brought the male-female theme into the analysis, which was then present in the analytic relationship like a dream function. Putting this intuition into the theoretical frame of post-Bionian field theory, the female function is considered as the desire to be “at one ment” with the other (O) and the masculine function to realize necessary separation and subjective knowledge (K).