Living Your Animal: Listening to Wild Gender and Sexuality

This paper addresses Jung's use of the quote “nothing human is alien to me” as an epitomizing statement on the ethics of analysis. Certain failures of listening in analytic practice are identified, typically experienced by queer and trans patients, using as an example a psychoanalytic paper on cruising and anonymous sex. Three themes that often emerge in analytic theory that pathologizes transgressive gender and sexuality are discussed, alongside contemporary psychoanalytic and Jungian-informed attempts to rethink them: the discourse on ‘part-object relating,’ the fixation on aetiology and what has termed a ‘traumatophobic’ approach, and the charge that wild gender and sexuality are theatrical and ritualistic. The author argues in favour of revisiting Jung's ideas on sexuality through a queer reading of references to animals in The Red Book, and a playful redefinition and repurposing of anima as animx, denoting psychic discoveries related to gender and sexuality that bring us to life and carry a numinous quality. A brief sequence in the film El Principe is used to illustrate Jung's observation that one doesn't have a sexuality and spirituality; instead, sexuality and spirituality have, or possess us. This queer Jungian epistemology of gender and sexuality allows for a less heroic vision of the role of the analyst, and one that values discomfort in the service of analytic change for both participants in the analysis.