Living Your Animal: Listening to Wild Gender and Sexuality

This paper identifies specific failures in listening within analytic practice, particularly as experienced by queer and trans patients, as illustrated through a psychoanalytic paper on cruising and anonymous sex. The discussion focuses on three recurring themes in analytic theory that often pathologize transgressive gender and sexuality: the discourse on “part-object relating,” the fixation on etiology, and an outdated approach to trauma, along with the assumption that wild gender and sexuality are inherently theatrical and ritualistic. The author advocates revisiting Jung’s ideas on sexuality through a queer interpretation of animal references in The Red Book and proposes a playful redefinition of the anima as animx—representing psychic discoveries related to gender and sexuality that possess a numinous quality and bring vitality. A brief film sequence illustrates Jung’s observation that one does not merely have a sexuality and spirituality—they have, or they possess, us. The proposed queer Jungian epistemology of gender and sexuality supports a less heroic vision of the analyst’s role, one that embraces discomfort as a catalyst for transformative change in both participants of the analysis.