Pubblichiamo abstract e link dell’articolo pubblicato sull’International Journal of Psychoanalysis che tratta dei temi che gli autori hanno sviluppato anche nel ciclo Sexual al Centro Psicoanalitico di Roma
Abstract
This paper introduces the concept of the political phantasm as a theoretical and clinical device capable of articulating the deep connections between unconscious desire, subjective configurations, and collective conditions of existence. The clinical case of Sky, a non-binary person in psychoanalytic treatment, serves as a starting point to question how contemporary analytic work must engage not only with intrapsychic and familial dynamics, but also with transindividual, transgenerational, and historical forces that shape subject formation and gender (Butler).
Sky’s experience is marked by traumatic encounters with embodiment, gender, shame, affective precarity, and intimacy, yet their subjectivity emerges as eccentric, vital, and irreducible to conventional diagnoses. The analytic process becomes a co-constructed field where new forms of desire and psychic existence unfold. The theory of the political phantasm arises from this clinical experience, in the tension between Sky’s singularity and their multiple familial, social, material, and historical ties.
Far from being a mere metaphor, the political phantasm is conceived as a processual, affective, and semantic matrix—an unconscious operator that organizes desire within a field traversed by power, norms, and genealogies. The subject is not only a translator of enigmatic signifiers (Laplanche), but also a product and actor within a collective scene: that of desire as social production (Deleuze and Guattari). Within this framework, gender is not an identity to claim or reject, but the site of an affective and symbolic excess that disrupts the very grammar of identification.
The analytic work with Sky required the analyst’s availability to become a malleable medium (Roussillon), to be used by the analytic scene without relying on diagnostic grids or etiological assumptions. This case demonstrates how analysis becomes possible only by overcoming the split between inner and outer, psychic and social, personal and political. Subjectivity, from this perspective, is not given but produced within a network of connections (Latour), where even non-human agents—hormones, digital devices, normative discourses—participate in the construction of meaning.
To conceptualize the political phantasm as a psychoanalytic category is to acknowledge the unconscious not as a private theater, but as a site of condensation and coagulation of forces that exceed the individual. It is a radically relational, collective, affectively distributed unconscious. Just as Freud revised his metapsychology in the aftermath of World War I, so too today’s clinical encounter with mutant subjectivities—trans, queer, posthuman—demands a rethinking of our fundamental theoretical premises. Trauma is no longer only absence, but also overstimulation, hyper-exposure, and excessive connectivity; phantasms, accordingly, shift from internal representations to impersonal dispositifs that organize perception and the very possibility of subjectivation.
Within the transference, Sky introduces a primary scene that is both affective and political: one of exclusion from the space of enjoyment, language, and sex. Against this backdrop, Sky mobilizes the symptom—anorexic, dissociative, performative—as a response to the social compulsion to choose an identity, a gender, a recognizable position. Testosterone, taken not to “become a man” but to neutralize an imposed positionality, functions as an affective and semiotic vector: it alters the body, making it more inhabitable, less exposed, more relational. This is a transformative use of the body as a threshold between intimacy and social bond.
This is not a clinic of dysphoria or of transsexualism as a universal category, but of the singular relation between body, desire, and connection that every minoritarian subject must reinvent. Analysis offers a space to explore this singularity as something that can never be fully represented or normed. Sky’s subjectivity is nomadic, hybrid, cyborg—but above all, relational: it is produced in the possibility of remaining in relation even in excess, pain, and impossibility.
Drawing on queer theory and Freudian metapsychology, we argue that the unconscious today is increasingly an interference field among heterogeneous layers: the Ego, the Id, but also social class, territorial history, and transgenerational trauma. The “scene of the father”—as both figure of enjoyment and castration—spans three generations and intertwines with a real-life mining disaster: a collective memory that acts as a trace (Derrida), a retroactive construction, an après-coup of origin.
In this light, the phantasm is neither mere defense nor symbolic representation, but a productive dispositif—generative of forms, postures, and potentialities. It is not interpreted but co-constructed within the temporality of analysis. It is the unconscious signature of a politics of desire, an affective and silent response to the injunction to normalize. Sky’s “gender trouble” is not a problem to solve, but a device that troubles—disrupts, disarticulates, opens—our very theoretical categories.
Finally, the analyst’s position is central to the technical reflection: not ideological alignment, nor neutral detachment, but an oscillating stance between polarities within the scene. Transference is nourished by micro-acts, silent presences, uncoded affective responses. Even the analyst’s appearance at a transfeminist protest, holding their child, carries interpretive value: not to deliver a known message, but to build a new relational space.
The clinical encounter with Sky urges us to think of psychoanalysis not as a settled body of knowledge, but as a situated practice capable of being questioned by the subjectivities of the present. The political phantasm is thus proposed as a theoretical tool that holds together the rigor of unconscious listening and the complexity of collective bonds—a way to name that threshold where psychic life must pass through the world in order to exist.
