The Umbilical¹

Traditional psychoanalytic approaches view excessive parental, social or relational involvement in human development as an opportunity for linking complex gender and identity experiences. The analyst's unconscious bias might present them with an opportunity for interpretation that might resemble something akin to conversion therapy. All of which leaves the patient feeling alienated thereby confirming their exiled Self. Early relational trauma affects every gender and sexual identity. In turn each traumatic situation, from inappropriate interference to traumatic abuse, affects how an individual forms and experiences relationships. Gender and sexual identity are fluid agencies of the Self within all human development. For people who are non-normative when it comes to their gender, identity or sexuality, evidence of early relational trauma should not unthinkingly be treated alongside mental health struggles. This clinical paper explores the once-weekly analytic work with a young trans man who was exiled and lived in a dysregulated state of mind from his early relational trauma. This paper uses images from the artist Louise Bourgeois to explore the early development of projective identification and to propose that this becomes a way of exiling unwanted feelings into the Other with the hope of finding a place of belonging as if through a psychic umbilical.