[The transsexual enigma. Apropos of the work of Jan Morris "Enigma"]

The fixity of the therapeutic demand of the transsexual renders it refractory to psychotherapeutic analysis, which always tries to reveal an other demand behind the explicit demand. But the transsexual wants nothing else than to obtain from the medical wf his intime conviction to belong to the opposite sex despite his non equivoqual hormonal anatomic and genetic sex. As a consequence, he demands surgical correction of this mistake of nature. The author wants to draw from J. Morris's remarquable work, both on human and literary grounds, the essential axis of the deep problems of the transsexual: the precocious apparition of the conviction which becomes irreversible, the concern to have it accredited by scientists, a desexualised verbalisation with a rich claim for gender (psychological sex), the impact of the desire of the mother on the future of the subject, the necessary idealisation of the mother (virgin cult), the problem of castration, the link between identity and recognition by the other. The psychotherapeutic failure gives rise to an important theoretical lesson which is clearly illustrated in the transsexual: one can not conound penis and phallus (Lacan), because if the transexxual is ready to live without the former, it is to obtain (or become) the latest.