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Beyond the Binary: Essays on Gender

Editor : Shari Thurer

Reviews and Endorsements

‘Gender is always arriving, and psychoanalysts seem always to be chasing its coattails. Most often this chase has been an effort to corral gender: to capture, categorize, and conclude. Beyond the Binary – a collection of essays written as history, memoir, guide, critique, bibliography – works to move past the capture of categories. This monograph is possessed of a beguiling intimacy that engages the reader to rethink gender, gendered embodiment, and the analytic enterprise in listening to gender, its vicissitudes, and discontents.’
Ken Corbett, Clinical Assistant Professor, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

‘Beyond the Binary is a deeply personal and beautiful collection of reflections about contemporary understandings of gender in the psychoanalytic community. Eloquently written and accessible to all who are curious, it impresses through its inclusivity and compelling engagement between the reader and its authors.’
Dr Daniel Anderson, psychiatrist and group analyst, author of ‘The Body of the Group: Sexuality and Gender in Group Analysis’

‘Psychoanalysis originated within a nineteenth-century, binary view conflating sexuality with gender. In this matrix, Freud hypothesized a biological, drive-driven, cross-cultural universal theory of mind. Times have changed. Today’s nontraditional gender presentations instead rely on individual subjectivities that call into question universalizing, cisnormative beliefs. These new clinical presentations also challenge psychoanalysts to move beyond procrustean developmental theories, theories that all too frequently lead to countertransferential impositions of therapists’ subjectivity onto patients.
Jack Drescher, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University, Adjunct Professor, New York University, Training and Supervising Analyst, William Alanson White Institute

'Two of the nine chapters are autobiographical accounts of non-binary people assigned male at birth. These accounts are powerful, and for me, by far the most illuminating contributions in the book. [...] The book's first-person accounts are worthwhile, and as a whole it has value for those curious about understandings of gender identity in the US psychoanalytic community.'
Kay Hoggett, integrative counsellor, coach and supervisor, BACP, Therapy Today, 2023