The Relational Psych Podcast
The Relational Psych Podcast makes therapy more approachable by inviting real mental health professionals to explain what they do, why they do it, and why it works, using simple, understandable language that anyone can apply to their lifelong growth.
The Relational Psych Podcast
Sex and Gender in Psychoanalysis with Sally Bjorklund
Tyson talks with Sally Bjorklund about a psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality and gender identity, tracing the evolution of theories about sex and gender from Freud through to Contemporary Relational analytic theory. Their conversation touches on the uses of sex and gender, polymorphus perversity, and exploding dice.
Sally is a psychoanalyst practicing in Seattle. She works with adults and couples and provides clinical consultation for therapists. She was co-founder and faculty of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Seattle (RPPS). She is a clinical supervisor for the National Training Program of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, is on the editorial board of the journal Psychoanalytic Perspectives, and teaches locally in various programs. She was a contributor to "Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst's Life Experience:When the Personal Becomes Professional” and has written and presented on various topics including sex and gender, adoption, aging, working with hard to reach patients and erotic transference.
https://www.sallybjorklund.com/
Further Learning:
Sexuality, Intimacy, Power by Muriel Dimen
Gender in Psychoanalytic Space edited by Muriel Dimen
Assuming a Body by Gayle Salaman
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
Gender as Soft Assembly by Adrienne Harris
Gender Born, Gender Made by Diane Ehrensaft
Please Select Your Gender by Patricia Gherovici
Podcast interview with Avgi Saketopoulou on her new book co-authored with Ann Pelligrini, Sexuality Beyond Consent.
© Relational Psych 2023
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Do you want to learn about psychological growth without sorting through the jargon? You're in the right place. This is the Relational Psych podcast. I'm your host licensed therapist Tyson Connor. On this show, we learn about the processes and theories behind personal growth and experience a little bit of it ourselves. This is season two, where we'll focus on the practice of relational psychotherapy, and explore concepts and theories that consider psychology from a relational lens. And please keep in mind that this podcast does not constitute therapeutic advice, but we might help you And my guest for this episode is Sally Bjorklund. Sally is a find some. psychoanalyst practicing in Seattle. She works with adults and couples and provides clinical consultation for therapists. She was co founder and faculty of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Seattle. She is a clinical supervisor in the National Training Program at the National Institute for Psychotherapy, she's is on the editorial board of the Journal of Psychoanalytic Perspectives and teaches locally in various programs. She was a contributor to clinical implications of the psychoanalyst life experience, when the personal becomes professional, and has written and presented on various topics, including sex and gender, adoption, aging, working with hard to reach patients, and erotic transference. Sally, thank you for coming on the show and today we are going to be answering the question or beginning to answer the question because might take longer than an hour. What is the psychoanalytic understanding of sex and gender? So, Sally, what's a psychoanalytic understanding of sex and gender?
Sally Bjorklund:Well, I guess we have to, we have to start with Freud where psychoanalysis starts. Freud is in some words in the culture, in the language we use that we don't necessarily know came from Freud. But Freud actually upset the whole Victorian society with his ideas about sexuality, talking about how our sexuality is polymorphusly perverse, and that his idea that we have this three part structure of the ID, ego and the super ego was the next part of his theory - that because the sexual instinct is so unruly, that we have to use our ego to control it, to make it work in the proper directions. Which according to him, are that sex should be about reproduction, it should be heterosexual. And his, his three parts of the way that were put together psychologically, are the ID, ego and the super ego. So the ID is the home of the sexual instinct. It's what drives us. And this is when you hear about Freud and drive theory - that drive is a sexual instinct. And it's the ego's job, to control the drives, to make them work in collaboration with the demands of society. The super ego then is also our conscience, our moral advisor that's formed by our parents and social regulations and controls us through anxiety, mostly through anxiety, and guilt. So Freud compared the ego in relationship to the rider and the horse. So if you think of the horse as the unruly sexual drive, then the ego is the rider who has to keep things in control. So Freud also thought that repressed sexual desires were at the root of all symptoms.
Tyson Conner:I feel like our Listeners might have, depending on their familiarity with Freud, the one thing that they'll most quickly go to in their mind is he's the guy who talks about sex all the time. He's the sex guy. And even in kind of pop culture or conversations on the internet. Anytime Freud comes up, one of the first things people will point out was Wow, that guy was constantly thinking about sex all the time. And what I'm hearing you say is that at Freud's time in -- for its social context, people weren't really talking overtly about sex and sexuality. It was a pretty highly repressed social context that he was in, there were clear rules about these things, and we didn't really talk about it. And Freud's -- or that was maybe the academic culture. And part of what Freud did that was so valuable, was he did start talking about it. And he made sense of human behavior through this, and a human mind, with sexuality as pretty central to it. You describe this three part person idea, which, every time I hear about it from Freud, I think about I think it was Aristotle also had a three part person idea, but he called it the appetite, the reason and spirit. And his analogy was of a charioteer, where reason was the charioteer, and then appetite and spirit, were these two wild horses that wanted to go different directions. And it sounds like Freud had a pretty, pretty similar concept of the ego being the self, and that kind of negotiates in some ways between the ID that wants things and the super ego that says, Well, this is how you behave appropriately to be acceptable-- something like that.
Sally Bjorklund:Exactly. And that's an interesting comparison with Aristotle, I think. But what it got me thinking of is something that Michel Foucault has written about in his book, The History of Sexuality, Volume I is that in the late 1800s, the sexologists at the time, even before Freud, were creating sex as a psychological phenomena, that before that sex was just something people did. So the idea that it it then becomes a sin or a psychological drive is a new idea. It's trying to connect the body with the mind in a new way. So when the sexologist start categorizing different types of sexualities, so Foucault would say that, before the sexologists people who had same sex sex, were just doing something. And after the sexologist, it became an identity category. So it was who you were not what you did.
Tyson Conner:Interesting, interesting. So that kind of cultural social shift was happening. Pretty concurrent, maybe a little bit before Freud, he jumped on that wave at a time where that was happening in, in conversations where people were curious about sex and also about human identity.
Sally Bjorklund:Exactly. So the idea of categorizing things of... that something becomes who you are, and not just what you do, I think was a significant historical change. Also the Victorian sensibility about the body was if you were wealthy, if you were upper class Victorian, the focus on not talking about the body as this kind of dirty thing you don't want to think about versus the average peasant, who's very much in their body. Living with all the bodily functions in the kingdom, there's no indoor plumbing. People sleep all in the same room. So the children are seeing their parents have intervourse and this is part of the background which Freud is writing about sex in a kind of new way, where he's saying that this is normal. We're all born polymorphously perverse.
Tyson Conner:So what does that mean? Polymorphously perversely,
Sally Bjorklund:It means anything can be an object, that our sexuality isn't tied to what he later called the aim. And the proper aim and object, I suppose, include animals or same sex, incest, or, that anything can be a target because we're driven by this sexual impulse, the instinct of the aim.
Tyson Conner:So when Freud says we're all polymorphously perverse, and that's scandalous thing to say. It's because at the time, there was the idea that among the upper crust, the people who were a little more disconnected from their bodies we'll say, at least in how they thought about folks and how they felt about being. There was an idea that sex is a thing that you do. That's also becoming an identity category, but it's for procreation, and it's between adult men and adult women, and it's between adult men and their wives. That's the category of what sex is. And Freud showed up and said, well, actually, inside of a person's mind, your sexuality isn't just constrained to that specific context. It kind of can go to lots of different places, and inside of your mind, even if you're not acting on it, is that is that kind of what he's getting?
Sally Bjorklund:I'm not sure. upperclass Victorian society was, I think, on the surface, they were very prudish, and applied to women were very prudish. But I think that sex was just what it always is. I don't know if you've seen Bridgerton, or those kinds of recreations of
Tyson Conner:Throughout history, although cultures are different. People are still people and people tend to have sex.
Sally Bjorklund:So I think what I was trying to say about Freud is that he did two kind of opposite things. He said, sexuality is normally unruly, and perverse. And that what's required as we develop psychologically, is that we become proper riders of the horse or steering the chariot. And the other thing he believed was that repressed sexuality was at the root of all psychological symptoms.
Tyson Conner:So he really was all about sex - depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, psychosis, all of it,
Sally Bjorklund:everything had to do with some kind of repressed sexuality. And well, and then there's two kinds, then there's the, the two kinds of unconscious are the Repressed, which is something that you've thought about. And then because it's unacceptable, you deny it or put it out of your mind. And then there's the drive of our ID, our beast, that's unconscious to us. From the beginning, we were never aware of our, of our ID drives.
Tyson Conner:So in terms of parts of human sexuality, that Freud thought caused trouble, there was the stuff that came in that we chased out of our awareness. And then there was the stuff that never was in our awareness in the first place. And each of those could cause trouble in their own separate ways.
Sally Bjorklund:If the drive can't be, managed by your ego and your super ego, it's gonna get you into trouble.
Tyson Conner:Oh, that makes sense.
Sally Bjorklund:And the other things that... well the example that fried gave from one of his patients was this woman had all these weird symptoms, she had a parapheasas and contractures - that an arm would get stuck in some weird position, you couldn't move it, she sometimes spoke in a foreign language for no apparent reason. And what he discovered through analysis was that she had been sexually attracted to her sister's fiance. And as soon as that came out, her symptoms went away. So that's kind of Freud's basis of saying these weird, unexplained symptoms all have some kind of repressed sexual reason. And so the job then of psychoanalysis is to uncover the repressed desires. That's basic Freudian psychoanalysis.
Tyson Conner:So the image that I'm hearing or that's developing in my mind is that to significantly oversimplify Freud's theory of sexuality, there was an aim or purpose of sexuality, which is to create more human beings - very biological basis, and it's heterosexual and it's with a person who can reproduce and that's healthy. That's what we're aiming for. That's what we're trying to become. And if that's where our sexuality is aimed, then we are psychologically well, but at the same time, that human beings' experience of their sexuality is incredibly varied and that everyone has sexual drives and experiences and attractions outside of that aim. And so then was his understanding that the goal of wellness, essentially was to no longer feel those other attractions or to be aware of them or?
Sally Bjorklund:Let me just back up because he talked about the instinct, aim and the object. So those are the things that have to line up. So you have your instinct is something you're kind of stuck with dealing with. Your ego needs to be in charge of having the proper aim, which is reproduction and the proper object which is the opposite sex, adult partner. I think the other thing that he really focuses on is symptoms having to do with repressed sexual desires. So that's different than ID drives are what Stephen Mitchell later - one of the founders of relational psychoanalysis - came to call the beast. Which by the way, Stephen Mitchell rejected Freud's idea of sex as the thing that drives human behavior. So, but just sticking to Freud, I think he thought society was in charge of regulating certain amount of people's behavior, but psychological health or treating people with symptoms meant being able to discover what their repressed sexual desires were.
Tyson Conner:And would those things be... so the category of instinct aim and object - instinct is I want to have sex. Aim is I want to have sex for this purpose. An object is I want to have sex with that person or thing.
Sally Bjorklund:Well, that's the holding the reins is the instinct, okay? And aim and the object are the proper harnessing of the drive,
Tyson Conner:I see. And okay, so this is for its conceptualization, which is pretty well tied to the time that Freud was around, and attitudes about human sexuality. And we haven't even talked about gender yet. Maybe we won't get there today, maybe that'll be a separate conversation, but attitudes about human sexuality have changed, a fair bit societally, since Freud. How has psychoanalysis and its attitude towards -- you made mention of Stephen Mitchell, one of these founders of this modern relational, contemporary, psychoanalytic turn movement, school, whatever it is, he rejected Freud's idea of the centrality of sexuality. So how did he think about sex?
Sally Bjorklund:Well as to back up a little bit, this is early Freud. So Freud, later, partly influenced by what he saw, the horrible stuff that went on and World War One introduced the idea of the death drive. So Freud's idea is that we are driven by these two drives, which sometimes work against each other of the sex drive, which is a life instinct, and a death drive. So then along comes well, there were some things in between, but Stephen Mitchell, in the 1980s, and other people that were instrumental. There wasn't really a founder of relational psychoanalysis. There were a group of people. But he, he and Dave Greenberg wrote the book that kind of started the whole relational revolution. And one thing Steve was pretty adamant about was rejecting the sexual instinct as the major motive of human behavior. He referred to Freud's sex instinct as the beast. And he believes he was influenced by Fairburn and other psychoanalytic thinkers to feel that a need for connection and attachment was a much more fundamental motivator of human beings. So the whole drive theory I think, has really been displaced by an idea that attachment needs something... Everybody knows about that. And it's read books. So they know their attachment style.
Tyson Conner:So attachment became more of the central, if there's a motivator, if there's a drive involved, it's probably more modern relational thinking would probably turn to attachment sooner than it turned to sex.
Sally Bjorklund:Well, absolutely. And if anything, I think later relational thinkers have been a little critical of Mitchell's downplaying of sex as a drive, like taming the beast too much. So there is more of a emphasis on the importance of the body, and sexuality along with the need for for connection and attachment. Andre Green kind of famously complained that relational thinking had taken sex out of psychoanalysis. Of course, it's a drastic, given its beginnings, it's a drastic thing to take out.
Tyson Conner:I'm thinking about how much of this conversation is about culture. We're talking about the culture that Freud grew up in. And we're also talking about the culture of psychoanalysis, and how psychoanalysis talks about a sex. And how we choose to talk about it as, as a group, like Freud's talking about sex, in a way, was very disruptive for the time and a way for him to speak directly to what he was seeing. And it almost feels like there's a, I don't know, a pendulum swing, or a push pull happening, where Mitchell and others are kind of de emphasizing the sexual side of things, in a way to try to expand it and to say, well, maybe there's other things going on. Maybe there's other things to think about. And also, maybe thinking about psychoanalysis as placed in, in society in the 80s and 90s. Maybe there's some motivation to try to make it a little bit less weird, and more acceptable to broader culture, saying, if everyone thinks of us as the people talking about sex all the time, I don't know, I don't know. That's just me playing with ideas. But it's, it's interesting, how much of this becomes a dialogue about how are we going to talk about this? And what does that mean for us as a community? How do we talk and think about sex? And is it the thing at the center? And do we have normative expectations of this is how a person is supposed to be? I don't know.
Sally Bjorklund:Well, I think that's a good point. I think there's a number of reasons that psychoanalysis which was kind of in its heyday, probably in the 60s when it was the dominant form of treatment and psychoanalysts were highly respected. And was complicated, because it really wasn't until the development of antipsychotic medications and then antidepressants, that psychiatry was considered a respected profession, that because psychiatrist really couldn't do anything without those, the kinds of medicines that we have now, especially for people with severe mental disorders there was no treatment. So psychiatry became a much more respectable and probably better paid profession, once antipsychotics were developed, and then antidepressants. So psychoanalysis didn't have a lot of competition for other forms of treatment and then for some people like in the Woody Allen kind of parody or version of psychoanalysis that there are certain people that that was just normal, everybody went to psychoanalysis. So I have had patients from Argentina who said, everybody in Argentina is in psychoanalysis from when they're children. So, but especially on the West Coast that's not a big part of our culture at all. And I think though, along with the development of antidepressants and other kinds of -- also, insurance companies didn't want to pay for psychoanalysis anymore and cultural changes in the 60s and 70s, attitudes about sexuality drastically changed. So I think it stopped being relevant.
Tyson Conner:So how does psychoanalysis catch up? Like Steven Mitchell refers to it as the beast. And in some ways, I'm hearing that now as this is the beast, in Freud's understanding this is the beast that needs taming inside of every person. And maybe Mitchell's also saying, this is also the beast in our theory that we've got to figure out how to tame so that we can...
Sally Bjorklund:I just think theory, Mitchell's great gift was to read everything instead of what often happens is people who identify with a certain theory then become siloed in that theory, and don't read anything else. He read everything, and he put together things that he thought were useful from lots of different theoretical orientations. And so one thing that replaced Drive Theory was a look at how we develop - how we develop in context of our family. So when it comes to sex, and gender, what do we get taught about sexuality in our family? If you grew up in a religious family, what kind of messages did you get? I actually remember, my family hosted this -- We sometimes hosted exchange students but this was a girl, teenage girl - I grew up in Chicago - from Minnesota who was... everything was mysterious about her. And I found out years later that she was pregnant. And that she got sense if we were staying with her that she was going to go to some home for unwed mothers that had to be far away from home. So there's some cover story for why she wasn't in Minnesota. That if you grew up in a family where that kind of -- it made a big impression and be like, Oh, my God, if you get pregnant, that's going to be... they're going to send you away somewhere. Which that's still happens for that matter.
Tyson Conner:Yeah
Sally Bjorklund:I think that the Wallingford... The Good Shepherd Center used to be a home for unwed girls.
Tyson Conner:Oh, wow.
Sally Bjorklund:It's that's part of our history, as well. So if you grew up in a family with a lot of shame about sex, or prudishness, or if you grew up in a family where there's none of that, and there's no boundaries, and maybe there's sexual abuse - you're going to have... that's going to affect your development as a sexual being, your relationship to sexuality. So relational theory was much more interested in thinking about what actually really happens to us, not some kind of ID drive. But what do we experience growing up? How does that affect our relationship to our bodies, our sense of ourselves as sexual beings? Is there trauma that's going to change things? How much is accepted in terms of experimenting or trying things out? Or, certainly as a clinician, that a huge number of people who seek us out for help, or people who have experienced some kind of sexual trauma? That changes how we develop as sexual beings. So anyway, Mitchell's point is that what really happens, actually, is what determines our relationship towards sexuality. And of course, I think it's also true that what's happening in the culture affects us. If you grew up in the late 60s and early 70s There's both the free love but there was also the Feminist Revolution, and Stonewall and all those things that were really changing the subsequent social messages about sexuality. And of course those that relapse into trying to control everybody's sexuality with the fall of Roe... I mean, that's... Don't get me started.
Tyson Conner:Different podcast, ha. Yes. So part of what I'm hearing you describe sounds to me like moving away from a way of thinking about sexuality that had a preconceived - this is what's inside of every person. And this is what it's supposed to be shaped into. And in a way from that, and into, Well, who knows what's inside of a person to begin with. But their early experiences growing up, heavily impact and maybe even fully defined how they engage with and experience their own sexuality internally, it was the shift from well, there's a default thing that's in there to, who knows what you get started with. But whatever you end up with, is probably determined by a combination of the culture you grew up in, and the subculture you grew up in of your family, and then also just your experiences of sexuality and of your own sexual self.
Sally Bjorklund:Well, and I think also bringing back the body into the question, not just of attachment and developmental experiences, but our relationships to our bodies of how do we relate to our bodies? What's it like to be in my particular body? And is it okay for me to touch myself in certain pleasurable ways? Or that I get the message that I'll go blind If I do that? Or whatever the message is about that. I don't think there's any denying that there's some kind of fundamental urge that almost everybody has -- remember being a teenager, surely, that how you respond to that, and yourself, your bodily inclinations, then I think interfaces with messages from your family, but if you've had trauma, what your personal experiences... and people use sex for all different kinds of reasons - sex can be deployed for all kinds of psychological needs of -- classic example is if a girl has experienced not having friends or being unpopular, all of a sudden, she discovers that boys are really interested in her sexually, and that she can get into trouble by deploying her sexuality as a way to get positive recognition, without understanding what could be the negative outcome of that. But we deploy sex in all kinds of - I mean, that's not news that, stories of having to sleep with the boss to get a promotion? Or? I don't know, you could probably think of any example.
Tyson Conner:I work with adolescents, I hear lots of stories about ways that sex is deployed. And it sounds like part of what... there's kind of like an expanding and expansiveness, or broadening of what sex could be for, and could mean. That the Freudian concept of these instinct, aim object categories are kind of like -- this is a very silly analogy, but I play a lot of tabletop role playing games, where you roll dice, and they tell you what to do. And sometimes dice explode, where if you roll a certain number, like a six, then you get to roll even more dice, and the number goes up and up and up and up. And so that's a mechanic that some people use when they're designing their games. I'm so sorry, Listener, this is a very nerdy tangent. But the image I got in my head is that this shift of thinking about sexuality a little bit differently, kind of explodes it a little bit, all of a sudden, the permutations of what sex can mean for a person is far more broad. And it sounds like there is less of a implicit judgment on it. And more of a complex curiosity about it. Okay, you used sex in this moment for this thing, and that isn't therefore perverse or isn't therefore a problem that needs fixing. It might be, but even a moment ago, when you said, we were talking about the inherent, the instinct, and if that's in people, and you said the word almost - you said almost everybody. That in and of itself feels like a pretty significant thing to say. Because to acknowledge even that there are some people who don't, asexual people exist, even acknowledging that kind of radically challenges some of the foundations of psychoanalysis. So to have a theory that makes room for that feels important but also challenging.
Sally Bjorklund:That's right. And again, because we have so many identity categories now, because there's an identity category for people who are asexual, that I think the categories again, get us into trouble with the 'this is who I am not what I do' and understanding how are people using or not using their bodies and their sexuality and why. This is what I hope happens in therapy that each individual gets to have a personal connection with an understanding of how they use their own sexuality, how they experience it, what feels good, what doesn't feel good, what they want, what they don't want. I think that Freud's system seemed like it had a lot of rules to it of that, but I think that was... I'm maybe giving him too much credit. But I think that was also his trying to acquiesce to Victorian society by not being too radical, because he was giving lectures, public lectures, and when talking about polymorphous perversity, which is shocking, in 1890s. I think it's important for relational psychoanalysis to get away from pathologizing, being the arbiter of what's normative, when it comes to sexuality and what's pathological. Because it's not that long ago, the DSM had pathologizing diagnoses for certain kinds of sexuality,
Tyson Conner:Listener to define some terms a little bit, but to pathologize something is to talk about a thing as if it's inherently a problem. A pathology is a sickness or illness. To pathologize something is to talk about something as if it's an illness. So an example that's likely coming to many of our listeners' minds is homosexuality being considered a mental disorder. The DSM is the Diagnostic Statistical Manual. There are on the fifth one, they're working on the sixth edition now. And it's the shared document that the medical system in the US and a few other countries, although there's some international alternatives that we all use to communicate to one another. We have these codes, and we have these diagnoses. And so then if you have a client chart, that client then moves to Florida, their doctor in Florida can read it and can understand, oh, this person was given this code, that means they have arthritis or whatever. And the DSM specifically is for the mental health related disorders, but it's part of that broader system. And the thing that I tell my clients is that it's mostly useful for communicating with insurance companies. But
Sally Bjorklund:I think that's it's main function. I have no other use for it.
Tyson Conner:Haha. Maybe it didn't used to be, maybe there used to be other functions for it, but doesn't seem like that's likely. And up until, what was it the DSM three, there was the big controversy? There was a really great radio lab episode about this, Listener. I'll link to it in the show notes. But it was kind of a big deal when homosexuality was removed from the DSM, because it had been in there a long time. And it was staying in there a long time.
Sally Bjorklund:I think that was in the... well, the American Psychological Association decriminalized or de-pathologized, took it out in I think it was 1971? But there's still... the American Psychoanalytic Association didn't really start admitting candidates to train in analysis until the early 1990s. And that was under threat of a lawsuit. So there still was a lot of years in at least in psychoanalysis, where homosexuality was considered a developmental problem that you needed to go back to analysis to undo and then once you were cured of your homosexuality, then you could get into analytic training,
Tyson Conner:Which is something that sounds pretty absurd to me.
Sally Bjorklund:Well, there were a couple of famous people like Ralph throat and Richard Isay, who some people will recognize those names who were not practicing their gayness when they got in, but then started practicing after they were already in, which is how they got in. And we're very influential within psychoanalysis of speaking out about that, and making a difference.
Tyson Conner:There's a couple of directions that I kind of want this conversation to go, but I'm guessing we have to pick one. But I'm hearing this, this development within the theory, from a kind of pathologizing of what's not normative. And by normative, Listener, that doesn't mean... It's kind of like normal, but not quite. Normative is when you say, this is the way it ought to be. So psychoanalysis had this normative idea of sexuality, this is how sexuality ought to be. And in the past 20-30 years, there was a movement away from that, away from saying this is how sexuality ought to be into something a little bit more descriptive, maybe? And curious- this is how sexuality seems to be working in people, and a kind of openness to more kinds of difference, that don't indicate pathology or wellness one way or the other, just kind of a fact of being a person.
Sally Bjorklund:Well said, I think that the idea that -- I'm not wild about the expression, your authentic self, because I don't know what the word authentic means, really. But there was so much suffering that was clearly caused by people who were having to be in the closet, and whose lives were significantly impacted by homophobia that I think that recognition that creating these normative standards and saying it's not okay to be you were really, really destructive. So I think we have shifted to -- Well, first of all, I think homosexuality within psychoanalysis is a non event now. That's completely accepted. And I think that the ideas of gender dysphoria and how gender develops has dramatically changed, as culture has demanded that it changed as well. But to be... psychoanalysis, psychology, in general, has had a normative advising function to say this is what normal people are. And if you aren't that you're deviant. So to take that responsibility seriously, and decide that, that needs to not be our job because we're seeing now this reversal, where there are people in the in extreme religious right to want to reimpose all those kinds of normative advising. restrictions on who people can be.
Tyson Conner:And I've also... I work with a lot of trans people. That's, that's a lot of the folks who I see, and I'm very aware of the controversy within the trans community around the category of gender dysphoria because it's inherently pathologizing. And it's a diagnosis that you need to have on your chart to receive this particular medical care. So I give people that diagnosis, in part so that they can get treatments that will let, in the same way that antidepressants can save people's lives, hormones save people's lives, and I've seen it happen. But for them to do that, I need to give them this diagnosis, which is inherently pathologizing. But then there's also this -- sorry, I'm thinking out loud. There's this tension that I'm hearing in when talking about sexuality, and maybe it applies to a certain degree to gender as well. Where these categories can be really limiting when we want to think about a person and how a person works, and these identity categories are really important for us to create community and have community and find community, they seem to be really important on a societal level to be able to say, these are my people. And those identity categories can sometimes limit people's ability to engage with all of the different parts of themselves.
Sally Bjorklund:It's making me think about Judith Butler's work. In particular, her idea of what do you have to be to be a recognizable subject to society? To be able to -- so you're talking about community, but there's also a way that I need to have my subjectivity validated and recognized in the way that I'm expressing it or living it? And so there are forces, political forces now that want to say that's not a viable subjectivity.
Tyson Conner:And the conversation around it even is to call... to say that to be trans is to be mentally ill. That's the argument. And from my experience in psychoanalytic spaces, there are some people who I've tried to talk to about some of my trans clients. And it's impossible to have a conversation that doesn't talk about psychosis. Because the fact that I'm talking about someone who's identified gender identity is different than than the one that they were assigned at birth. Their mind this, this person, who I have had conversations with, their mind immediately goes to psychosis, because it's in their brain. Well, the gender you're born with is your gender. And if you think you're a different one, then you're psychotic. That's just the theory that they're working with.
Sally Bjorklund:I can't imagine that there isn't anybody who hasn't had some feeling of an out of gender experience at some time in their life. I think men have a version of it, or -- just think about my own thinking about this. There's really fun pictures from when I'm five and with my best friend, Larry Crawford, and he's got this really cool Hawaiian print swimming trunks. And I have these kind of goofy shorts, and neither of us have any top on. And we're in this swimming pool, having a great time. And I really remember what my mother said, You can't not wear a shirt anymore. Why? I look exactly like Larry Crawford from a top up. Feeling like that's just insane. I didn't mind being a girl, but I minded that the roles are different. for girls. And that happened a lot. Because I was a kid before title nine. So there were a lot of - as the best pitcher in the baseball team that let me pitch for Little League, but I couldn't play in the games because it was a girl - why? So my own experience was, I don't want to be a boy. But I don't want this definition. But being a girl is right, so that. And conversely, I had the experience of walking into a coffee shop and I was dressed kinda fancy and they, you know a nice, dressy blouse and some white pants I happen to have on Doc Martens. And this woman has got on this really tight fitting top with lots of cleavage sticking out and a very short tight skirt and high heels. And she walked in the door in front of me and I thought, are we've this from the same species? The same group? Not so much that I felt like I was failing at my gender performance as a female. But I just looked at her and I thought, she is as alien to me - dressing up like that is so alien to my experience that I can't imagine that. But I've also had patients who've literally said - male patients - have said, You're not very feminine, are you? I mean, they weren't the most technical patients, but in essence were saying you're not doing a very good job of performing your gender correctly. But I think probably men have that if they are moved to tears at some moment when they're not supposed to cry, or...
Tyson Conner:Well, I am remembering. I was on a mission trip. There was a time in my life where that was going to be a big part of my life. And that's no longer the case.
Sally Bjorklund:Not a mission to another planet?
Tyson Conner:No, no, it was a mission. Well, it might as well have been Southeast Asia. Oh boy. But we were on this mission trip and we were kayaking. For some reason. I don't know why, what that had to do --
Sally Bjorklund:Kayaking for the Lord. Haha
Tyson Conner:Yes, kayaking for Jesus, thank you - ha! He enjoyed our kayaking trip likely. And I was in this area where these two people I was paired up with one of the leaders of the group. And we were paddling along, and I was We know what happened to that place. just about to go off to Seattle to go to school. And she was talking to me about, well, what church are you going to go to? And what are you going to do? And somehow our conversation moved to where I felt I fit in in the group and in the social circles that I run in, because this group was mostly women. And there was me and one other guy on this trip. And I said, just thinking out loud to her as its 18 year old. I was like, I don't know, I think there's a lot of ways where I'm, I'm just more feminine. And, she she reacted like she was offended. She was, no, no, no, no, no, not feminine, sensitive, maybe, but you're still a man. And I remember that phrase 'sensitive, maybe, but you're still a man.' And it was like, for me to say, Toxic masculinity is what happened in that place on an I don't know, I feel kind of feminine, was a threat or something. It was emasculating. Which is not how I -- actually she actually recommended I go to Mars Hill, the church. epic scale. So I'm glad I didn't listen to her. That's not true. I went to Mars Hill a couple times. And then I did what most college students did, and I stopped going to church because there are more fun things to do on my Sunday mornings, like sleep.
Sally Bjorklund:So you really were on a mission to Mars?
Tyson Conner:I was Oh, absolutely. That's funny. But I think part of what I'm curious about is when talking about gender, did psychoanalysis have a similar kind of development? Along as we talked about, with sexuality, whether there was this normative prescriptive, this is how it ought to be. And then more recently, a movement towards a more open, gender is a part of a person's mind but isn't predetermined to be one thing or another?
Sally Bjorklund:Well, I think psychoanalysis was dominated by men forever male voices. And even women analysts had to kind of act like men to be in the club. But the beginning of relational psychoanalysis brought in voices from all different disciplines of like Jessica Benjamin, who comes from critical theory and social theory. Adrienne Harris, who comes from developmental theory, Merrill Dimon who came from anthropology, and all this really strong feminist backgrounds. And Steve Mitchell was really open to... wanted them included from the very beginning in the small groups to get together to talk that sort of invented this new way of thinking. And feminism was a huge part of that. So I think the, the kind of questioning of the underlying assumptions that were never questioned about gender by psychoanalysis, were suddenly now saying, society has a huge impact on how we all develop in terms of our genderness -- that's making me think of what you said before about gender dysphoria. Virginia Goldener wrote a wonderful article about trans things where she pointed out that if a woman like Kim Kardashian, for example, wants to go have butt implants and breasts modified and all kinds of plastic surgery, she doesn't have to go have a psychiatric evaluation first. So it's okay to, to go from being femme to more femme. But if you want to cross then you have to get permission in a psychiatric interview that... it's a weird paradox. Because of course, some people use plastic surgery to make themselves look like they're from another planets.
Tyson Conner:Well, I'm thinking about the idea of thinking about sexuality in terms of how we use it, and what it's used for, and how I think gender is often something that we use. We use it for lots of different things. I've known people who used their gender to protect themselves. And I've known people who used their gender to be provocative and challenging. And people who have used their gender to move up in their careers and people who have you who have minimized their gender so that they could move up in their careers.
Sally Bjorklund:And that reminds me of this wonderful, remarkable patient I saw years ago who had come out of a really abusive childhood and escaped home, but lived on the streets and passed as a boy, for a decade. She figured out it'd be a way to avoid... So there's some obvious things like that, but in my work with trans people, I feel I'm a little reluctant about the places that are just 100%. If you think that you're trans, we'll do everything we can to facilitate your next steps. And I won't do those evaluations, because I'm so opposed to the whole idea. That I think that's wrong to have to give people a psychiatric disorder. But people need it, so good that you're willing to do it. But it has been my experience that people use their gender for lots of complicated reasons and sometimes have had the experience that somebody who did work with somebody who was facilitated to very easy, smooth- Oh, so you're trans? Here, I'll help you do this without really asking very many questions - that in working more closely with this person, it really seemed like they needed a new way to start. Their sense of themselves as a person as a subject had just felt like it was failing. And so it was either kind of suicide, or then the idea that, Oh, I could, I could transition and have a new start and had, a whole fantasy imagination about this person that they could become that was fixing a different problem. And what we discovered was they went through the transition process, but they still had the thing that they had before. How do I have, because they still didn't really have a viable sense of being somebody to themselves they can be in the world, not just to other people. So sometimes people are too quick to facilitate. Oh, this will fix the problem without really looking more deeply at what does the person need that they're using gender to try to achieve - not that there's anything wrong with transitioning, but maybe it's missing the point of what a person actually really needs? Or is trying to figure out how to have a viable sense of subject to themselves.
Tyson Conner:I feel there's a parallel here with, I made the comment before, in the same way that that antidepressants can save lives, I've seen hormones be able to save lives. And similarly to how antidepressants are really effective at reducing the symptoms, but don't always, well, they don't get to the underlying cause. Sometimes the underlying cause of depression appears to be purely, biological imbalance of chemicals in the brain and okay, and I've met people who they take their meds, and then things are better, and they're just I'm good. That's their experience, and I'm not going to take that away from them. And I've also met an awful lot more people who take their meds and that helps a lot. And there's also something that that depression was coming from. There's something that spurned the symptom, that there's some benefit in being curious about and trying to make sense of, or engage with or make contact with lots of different words, for some version of look at it and think about it. And I'm hearing you suggest that maybe there's something similar going on with gender. Where yeah, transition is a powerful, important significant part of a trans person's experience. And that if we think of gender as this thing that just is in a person one way or another, then we we might miss out on a lot of the ways that we use gender and the ways that gender evolves in developed in person exactly that the curiosity isn't so that we can gate keep it better, but so that we can help people understand themselves better and more fully
Sally Bjorklund:And in some ways trans can reify the gender right. binary, so that non binary is this whole other thing that, I mean, in some ways, it's kind of exciting, because it seems like it's trying to undo - gonna be hard to get rid of. Because in part, then we have to choose from the gendered performances to create a non binary thing. So we're stuck in this circular thing of how do you get outside of the gender binary, but I think there's... I remember working with this man who was, he was really, really handsome, he dressed impeccably, he was financially successful, he had a lot of money. And he had a tremendous amount of guilt - oh and he's white - for his while male privilege and everything he had in life. And so he tended to date women of color, who didn't have very much money and helped them out financially. And he was seriously thinking about trying to figure out how to be non binary. As a way, I think, to try to solve his problem with feeling guilty for all of his male white privilege - a way to try to say, I want to find the community of, like you were saying before about importance of community is, a community of I don't want to belong to this club that I kind of fell into, but I don't like being in this club. And I thought that was really interesting that he was seriously thinking about trying to perform his gender differently as both to escape something in himself, but also to identify differently with other folks.
Tyson Conner:That is fascinating. I think there -- in the outline that we're working off of, you included a Judith Butler quote that I hadn't seen before, and I want to read it, because it's coming to mind now. So thank you. But the idea that'gender is an imitation for which there is no original.'
Sally Bjorklund:Exactly
Tyson Conner:That concept is - I'm sure there are some Listeners who are like, Tyson that's basic feminism. I'm sorry, I went to an evangelical undergrad I didn't I wasn't exposed to a lot of basic feminists have
Sally Bjorklund:Not everybody's read Judith Butler.
Tyson Conner:Including me. So but now you've heard that quote, and I think I'm aware of time, and I want to respect your time and wrap us up. And, again, to oversimplify a lot of what we talked about, the thing that I'm hearing you say is in answer to the question, what's the psychoanalytic understanding of sex and gender? Part of the answer is, it's complex. And it's curious about what people are up to, in their use of an engagement with their sexuality, and gender, both as they are things that are done. And as they are things that we are, both in terms of gender identity and action. And it sounds like if there's an invitation in what you're describing, it's an invitation to use psychoanalysis, or an analytic psychotherapy, or whatever that space as a space to be able to be curious about the ways that you don't fit into the categories. There are some ways that in general conversation, we've all accepted certain categories. And we all share them, and we don't question them. And I present myself as a cis man in the world. And as we've already talked about, I Yes, I have had experiences that are outside of my gender. And a psychotherapy or psychoanalysis is a space to be curious about those other parts, to be able to say, hey, there are parts of me that don't fit the categories that I adhere to kind of rigidly outside of here, to be a little less rigid about it to be a little more curious about it, and maybe discover new parts of yourself and maybe understand oneself a little bit more, maybe find some conflicts that can be resolved or something I don't know.
Sally Bjorklund:We just have a better sense of kind of claiming... a sense of owning who you are and how you want to perform or express yourself that, in addition to the all the developmental things we talked about, there's also Francisco Gonzalez and others have introduced the idea of this social unconscious and, yes, Freud's unconscious, but the way that we are interfacing all the time with not just psychological norms, but with pressure from society from how to be, or how to look or how to act. And I think that analysis can be enormously helpful in trying to help a person find what... how they're put together, what matters to them, what it would mean to them to live passionately. And with as much self awareness as possible, as opposed to just following trends or trying to either avoid or get some benefits. I think those of us who do this work, believe and have a passion for self awareness as a path to fulfillment. That was the commercial for ya.
Tyson Conner:All right, well, I'm sold. Anything that you would like to plug or or advertise? I mean, if people are hearing this conversation, and they want to find you, where can you be? Where would you like to be found?
Sally Bjorklund:Well, I do have a website! I could be found on the interweb. Read Judith Butler. Read Michel Foucault, study history, because history is repeating itself right now. And Milan Kundera said man's struggle with power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. My might have gotten that not exactly right. That seems really important right now. To be able to remember where we've been. And to not forget what we know from the past.
Tyson Conner:That does feel really important and relevant to the things that we're discussing today. Because they often come for queer people first, controlling normatizing systems. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We appreciate it
Sally Bjorklund:It was fun.
Tyson Conner:I'm glad. Special thanks to Sally Bjorklund for coming onto this episode of the podcast. Sally can be found at her website, Sallybjorklund.com. Sally has also provided us with quite the extensive further learning list of resources. The booklets that Sally provided could serve as the reading list for a course, an introductory course on a psychoanalytic understanding of sex and gender. So, Listener, if anything that we talked about today really caught your attention or sparked your curiosity, I highly encourage you to check out that book list in the further learning section. There's a lot of ways into this topic. And a lot of those books are a lovely starting point. For an experiment this episode, we really just have a couple of questions that we'd love you to ponder, Listener. The first question is, when were you first aware of your gender? And the follow up question to that. When have you felt like you weren't doing your gender right? Or misaligned with your gender or mis attuned with it? My hope is that these two questions might get you thinking about your own gender identity development and ways that maybe you haven't thought about before. And also about how you use your gender in the way that Sally and I talked about in this episode, and some of the same questions can be applied to sexuality as well. How do you use your sexuality? When did you first become aware of your sexuality? When did you feel misaligned with your sexuality? So that's the experiment. Just think about it, see what comes up. And if you're in therapy, and are interested, talk to your therapist about it. Because if your therapist is anything like me, they will be very curious to hear. The Relational Psych Podcast is a production of Relational Psych, a mental health clinic providing depth oriented psychotherapy and psychological testing in person in Seattle and virtually throughout Washington state. If you're interested in psychotherapy or psychological testing for yourself or a family member, links to our contact information are in the show notes. If you are a psychotherapist and would like to be a guest on the show or a listener with a suggestion for someone you'd like us to interview, you can contact me at podcast@relationalpsych.group. The Relational Psych podcast is hosted and produced by me, Tyson Conner. Sam Claney is our executive producer with technical support by Ally Raye and the team at VirtualAlly. Carly Claney is our CEO. Our music is by Ben Lewis. We love you buddy.
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