Vanessa Sinclair et al., "The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond" (Routledge, 2024)

Sep 17, 2025

Vanessa Sinclair is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst based in Sweden, while Miriam Sauer is a PhD candidate and poet in Berlin with interests in psychoanalysis and gender studies. They delve into the nuanced history of psychoanalysis regarding queerness and its evolution, emphasizing the need for inclusivity in the field. Discussions include the complexities of working with queer and trans individuals, the importance of diverse voices in psychoanalytic discourse, and the power of personal narratives. Their insights call for a transformative approach to understanding identity and sexuality.

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INSIGHT

Queerness Is Intrinsic To Psychoanalysis

The book frames queerness as inherent within psychoanalysis rather than something to be added onto it.
Editors shifted from "heritage" to "queerness" to emphasize psychoanalysis's built-in disruptions and political stakes.

INSIGHT

Centering Trans Voices As Political Intervention

The volume centers trans voices and aims for trans liberation within psychoanalysis.
Editors prioritized contributions by trans scholars to challenge institutional transphobia.

ANECDOTE

Freud's Acceptance Of Breyer

Elizabeth's essay shows Freud accepted Breyer's boy identity and supported his becoming an analyst.
The chapter highlights unexpected historical openness within Freud's clinical relationships.

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The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) is an exploration of psychoanalysis' often complicated and fraught history with thinking about queerness, as well as its multifaceted heritage. Throughout the chapters, the contributors write about psychoanalysis’ relationship with queerness, the ways in which queerness is represented in the psychoanalytic archive, and how that archive endures in the present and creates various disruptive effects both within and beyond the clinic. Each chapter from the global cohort of contributors approaches queerness from a different angle: they consider the literary aspects of queerness’ presence in the analytic world; the clinical complexities of working with queer and trans people; metapsychological inclusion and exclusion of queerness, and many other subjects. Taken together these contributions constitute a decisive intervention into the psychoanalytic canon. They are an unabashed demand for accepting and furthering the representation and inclusion of queer, and in particular trans, people within psychoanalysis. It is a call for action to utilize and deepen psychoanalysis’ enormous explicatory powers and bring together voices that have so far been denied a unity of expression, while critically reevaluating psychoanalysis’ historical relationship to queerness. Each chapter proposes different ways of thinking and writing psychoanalytically, with many of the papers queering the format and forms of expression commonly found in academic writing, through their use of dialogues, conversations, or other experimental forms of writing.

Written almost exclusively by analysts, scholars, and activists who identify as trans and/or queer, this important volume puts theory into practice by centering queer and trans voices.

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