Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts: A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts

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Preciado elegantly summarizes the admittedly brutal history of psychoanalysis and gender. Much of what he documents I first encountered in a paper by Patricia Gherovici, “Psychoanalysis Needs a Sex Change,” which traces the medical and psychiatric development of the idea of transsexuality in Western Europe and the United States. Yet Gherovici’s account differs from Preciado’s. As an analyst and an American Lacanian, Gherovici wants to advance the discipline and expresses sympathy toward its leading figures and their historically limited views. Preciado, meanwhile, wants to shred the discipline, to blow it apart. He writes: Near the end of the book (ostensibly never spoken aloud during his engagement, due to the aforementioned booing off the stage), Preciado moves toward a statement of purpose:

Drawing on decades of radical trans theory, Preciado presents not just a searing critique of the psychoanalytic establishment, but also a bold challenge to it. Calling for a paradigm shift that will have an impact way beyond its intended field, Can the Monster Speak? demands its audience to think politically, granting new power to previously marginalized voices. November 2019, Paul Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference in Paris. Standing in front of the profession for whom he is a “mentally ill person” suffering from “gender dysphoria,” Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka's “Report to an Academy,” in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars. We urgently need clinical practice to transition. This cannot happen without a revolutionary mutation in psychoanalysis, and a critical challenge of its patriarchal-colonial presuppositions. A transition in clinical practice would entail a shift in position: the object of study becomes the subject, while the person who, until now, has been the subject agrees to submit to a process of study, questioning and experimentation. The former subject agrees to change. The subject/object duality (both clinically and epistemologically) disappears and is replaced by a new relationship, one that conjointly leads to mutation and to becoming other. It will be about strength and mutation rather than power and knowledge. It will entail learning together, and healing our wounds, abandoning the techniques of violence and devising a new approach to the reproduction of life on a planetary scale.”Like Haraway in A Cyborg Manifesto , Preciado creates a posthuman figure to escape the confines of white European colonial hegemony. However, Preciado moves from the image of the monstrous, civilised ape to becoming the monster himself, by means of testosterone injections. This idea of moving beyond the human is one Deleuze and Guattari are very interested in; particularly in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The segmented life of the human needs to go schizo if it is to cross boundaries and escape the capitalist-realist machine of manufactured desire. The part of me that is a teacher or activist, admittedly one with a psychodynamic lens, feels that Can the Monster Speak? plays out the tropes of oppositionality between marginalized queer people and the psychoanalytic establishment without taking on more deeply the issue of what transformation could look like. Preciado seems to dare his audience to take him seriously as the first step toward changing their perspective, to see him as an expert. I wonder what it would look like if he had more deeply elaborated on his invitation to his audience to enter into a “new relationship” (which he invokes only in his closing) between the psychoanalytic establishment and queer people. Another way the text might have been more interesting is for the author to have gone more deeply into their own experiences of psychoanalysis, but these are just glossed over.

Paul Preciado's controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time. The joy of reading Preciado, whether or not one has the theoretical tools to support or refute him, is the single and singular life that pulses in every word, and speaks to the individual within each of us and not – as all too often – to our persona.’

The regime of difference

I do not believe that heterosexuality is a sexual practice or a sexual identity but, like Monique Wittig, a political regime that reduces the sum total of the living human body and its psychic energy to its reproductive potential, a position of discursive and institutional power. Epistemologically and politically, the psychoanalyst is a binary heterosexual body... until proven otherwise.

Preciado was invited to give a lecture in front of l'École de la Cause Freudienne on their "women in psychoanalysis" day and decided to take the several hundred strong audience of psychoanalysts to task for their arrogance and pathologization of women, trans people, survivors of sexual violence, et al. His argument is summarzied above — that psychoanalysis needs to get its head out of the 19th Century and wake up to the world we currently live in, particularly regarding trans and intersex people. As so often with Preciado, he presents a bunch of ideas which are already old hat among trans people and queers as though they are earth-shattering revelations. Though, judging by my favourite part of this book — the footnotes where Preciado places the audience booing at him! — perhaps for some stodgy straight Parisian psychoanalysts, they truly are ground-breaking and a bit threatening. Psychoanalytic concepts of the libido, of active-passive roles, penis envy, castration anxiety, the phallic woman, genital love, hysteria, masochism, bisexuality, androgyny, the phallic phase, the Oedipus complex, the oedipal position, the pre-genital and genital stages, perversion, coitus, the preliminary pleasure principle, the primal scene, homosexuality, heterosexuality - the list is almost endless - are meaningless outside the epistemology of sex, gender and sexual difference." Book Genre: Essays, Feminism, Gender, Gender Studies, LGBT, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Queer, Theory, WritingIn 2017, one of the more challenging and self-hating periods of my life in terms of my own transition and mental health, I asked my psychodynamic psychotherapist, who was also trans, if he thought I was suffering from narcissism. I had been having conversations at the time with a friend about one of their family members who monologued about himself constantly, and I was feeling like I had become similarly narcissistic in my depression, anxiety, and dysphoria, a long-talking self-absorbed parody of a wounded adult person. My therapist replied generously that he thought I was not suffering from pathological narcissism, but that I did have narcissistic defenses, ways of intensely focusing on myself when I was in pain that could be healing in some ways and create problems in others. I channel this side of myself, the side that wants to talk and talk, into my writing, which is also personal, creative. I attempt to channel other parts of myself when I am practicing therapy or teaching. In November 2019, Paul B. Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference in Paris. Standing up in front of the profession for whom he is a ‘mentally ill person’ suffering from ‘gender dysphoria’, Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’, in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars. Drawing on decades of radical trans theory, Preciado presents not just a searing critique of the psychoanalytic establishment, but also a bold challenge to it. Calling for a paradigm shift that will have an impact way beyond its intended field, Can the Monster Speak? demands its audience to think politically, granting new power to previously marginalized voices.’ In November 2019, Paul Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference in Paris. Standing in front of the profession for whom he is a “mentally ill person” suffering from “gender dysphoria,” Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka’s “Report to an Academy,” in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars.