Countertransference Madness: Supervision, Trans∗, and the Sexual.

Drawing on Ferenczi's "confusion of tongues" paradigm, the author argues that the internalization of the supervisor's superego has the potential not only to expand the supervisee's ego (introjection), but also to repress their idiosyncratic functions and attack their thinking activity (intropression). To illustrate this argument, the author recounts his own supervised treatment of a transgender patient during which the supervisor-supervisee transference lapsed into a sadomasochistic dialectic and a folie à deux, leading to the premature termination of both the therapy and the supervision. While the initial interpretation of this experience underscored the supervisor's transphobia, the après-coup of writing up the case has revealed more complex thinking. Accordingly, the countertransference madness to which the author succumbed with his supervisor can now be understood as the unbinding of repressed infantile sexuality and the reenactment of paradoxical scenarios that the patient experienced with his parents.

Gender, Violence, and Trauma: A Case of Transmasculine Subjectification and Resistance in the French Biopolitical Context.

Given the relative invisibility of female-to-male trans identities in academic literature and cultural representations, the author attempts to provide a psychoanalytical understanding of his therapeutic work in the French activist milieu with an adult wishing to change the female gender assigned at birth. On the basis of the theoretical framework of enigmatic messages by Jean Laplanche and gender melancholy by Judith Butler, he explores the multiple expressions of violence-intrapsychic, family, social, and clinical-that contribute to the complex dynamics of gender subjectivity. In the context of these cumulative traumas, the therapist's self-questioning of his own countertransference proves crucial. The author further reflects on the intersectional interweaving of ethnicity and gender.

The Therapist's Transition.

Eager to distance himself from the clinical mistreatment and theoretical arrogance shown toward a gender-variant population, a self-identified cis-gendered male clinician-researcher narrates his experiences, difficulties, and doubts from a psychoanalytic standpoint in his interactions with a transgender adult in an institutional setting. He thus addresses from a pluralistic perspective the intrapsychic concerns and sociocultural norms that contribute to the patient's suffering, as well as the therapist's own vulnerability and countertransference challenges in this situation. By reflecting on the very traps that he fell into when writing a previous version of this article, the author proposes a focused narrative, co-signed by his supervisor, to provide the reader with a cautionary tale of how easily a clinician's efforts to understand may devolve into objectifications embedded in the history of analytic thinking.

Jealousy as a Driving Force for Murder.

This essay draws on analytic concepts and artistic examples in order to explore murder as the ultimate fate of jealousy. The paper first explores two seemingly neurotic forms of possessive fury that result in a crime of passion. Both cases probe the criminal potential of a supposedly normal subject and question the frontiers of narcissism and self-love, while discussing gender stereotypes. The author then examines criminal jealousy from the vantage point of the specular stakes at play: the enamoration of the double pervaded with aggressiveness that stems from the pre-oedipal fraternal complex and leads to outbursts of psychotic allure. Furthermore, this contribution appraises the hedonistic possibilities created by crimes of passion that are "beyond the pleasure principle." Finally, the figure of the jealous criminal is understood as a radicalization of a universal logic, according to which primary narcissistic wounds are felt to be an unbearable injustice that requires reparation through an infringement of the law.

Achilles: A Homeric hero enamoured with the absolute.

This article explores through a psychoanalytical lens the character of Achilles in Homer's Iliad, the matrix behind the Western conception of heroism. The contribution reveals the psychological link binding the words and acts of the most valiant of warriors in Antiquity, which is situated in myth and termed "the Eros of the absolute." The paroxystic ideality underlying the aforementioned myth, which is rooted in the anthropological need to believe, is at the origin of Achilles' legendary µá¿†νις, that is, the flood of rage triggered by contests for supremacy, aggravated by the loss of his war comrade, aroused by the drama of aging and death, and then transfigured through song and memory. The main claim of the author is that Iliad, despite its seeming lack of attention to interiority, is launched by the archetypal emotion of wrath and owes its appeal to its hero's embrace of heroic idealism in an excessive, radical and absolute way that results in a captivating narcissism and sadomasochistic antithesis of ideality. This argument leads to the conclusion that Homer is the Father of the "primitive horde" of affects.

Sándor Ferenczi's multiple confusions of tongues and their influence on psychoanalytical thinking.

Using a poststructuralist model, this article explores the lecture given by Ferenczi and published under the title "Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child-(The Language of Tenderness and Passion)." By initially focusing on the closed structure of the text, the author identifies two types of confusion of tongues that are closely interlinked: the confusion between adults and the child, and that between the analyst and the analysand. By then placing the manuscript within the corpus of Ferenczi, he connects it to the latter's multilingualism and pleads in favour of autobiographical determinants for psychoanalytic conceptualizations. This positioning of the text in its historical framework also enables it to be situated in the context of the metapsychological confusion of tongues between Freud and Ferenczi, and to delimit the influence of Ferenczi's ideas in psychoanalytic posterity.

Achilles: A Homeric hero enamoured with the absolute.

This article explores through a psychoanalytical lens the character of Achilles in Homer's Iliad, the matrix behind the Western conception of heroism. The contribution reveals the psychological link binding the words and acts of the most valiant of warriors in Antiquity, which is situated in myth and termed "the Eros of the absolute." The paroxystic ideality underlying the aforementioned myth, which is rooted in the anthropological need to believe, is at the origin of Achilles' legendary µá¿†νις, that is, the flood of rage triggered by contests for supremacy, aggravated by the loss of his war comrade, aroused by the drama of aging and death, and then transfigured through song and memory. The main claim of the author is that Iliad, despite its seeming lack of attention to interiority, is launched by the archetypal emotion of wrath and owes its appeal to its hero's embrace of heroic idealism in an excessive, radical and absolute way that results in a captivating narcissism and sadomasochistic antithesis of ideality. This argument leads to the conclusion that Homer is the Father of the "primitive horde" of affects.