Author Description

In the title of this book we wanted to introduce a hyphen into the word “id-entity” in order to emphasize the need for psychoanalysts, even when dealing with gender id-entity, to mark the ground by invoking the “Id”, the unconscious. The dialogue (not identification) between the sphere of empirical research and clinical practice, and more generally between psychoanalysis and neighbouring scientific disciplines (neuroscience, infant research, etc.) can fulfil another unavoidable task inside the specific field of cross-gender identification studies. Avoiding the conception of psychoanalytic treatment as a ‘prosthetic’ intervention, merely aiming at helping manage what ‘trans’ individuals feel as ‘egodystonic’, or as a sort of ‘psycho-education’ by which they can increase their own ‘coping’ abilities facing social stigma and other existential difficulties, psychoanalytically inspired psychotherapy should preserve some aspects partly ‘autochthonous’ and original and partly ‘borrowed’ from neighbouring disciplines, in order to maintain its own distinctiveness and ‘identity’. We can distinguish some important issues: A) The concept of ‘embodiment’, borrowed by psychoanalysis from neuroscience (for example, Damasio), whose centrality seems to provide further confirmations of the Winnicottian concept of body ‘personification’. The concept of mirroring, which psychoanalysis had already developed autonomously (Winnicott, Kohut). In the light of the dialogue of psychoanalysis with infant research (once again a very important interdisciplinary border) even the chronology of gender identity development is to be revised. The peculiar transference and countertransference dynamics in the treatment of ‘trans’ individuals. The revision of the traditional Oedipal concepts in the light of a contemporary formulation in which a distinction between biological sex and gender identity is maintained (the latter presenting at a phenomenological level the two questions of ‘who inhabits this bo