Refine
Language
- English (2)
Document Type
- Articles (2)
Has Fulltext
- no (2)
Year of publication
- 1999 (2) (remove)
A gendered person lives in and creates a gendered body. Through the sexual life of the couple, two gendered bodies come together. In this paper, I draw on case material to illustrate how a multitude of sensations associated with what it feels like to be a man or a woman is aroused, affirmed, and created as one dimension of sexual experience. I suggest that these gender sensations may be organized through the three psychological positions – autistic-contiguous, paranoid-schizoid, and depressive. The movement among all three positions gives different shapes to sensory-based gender experience – each position making its own unique contributions to the qualities of what it feels like to be a man or a woman. In one case, I consider the possibility that gender transformation occurred through an unconscious intersubjective erotic third – the body of the couple – created between the patient and her husband.