Spyros Zenios, psychologist and researcher, will be conducting a second interview with Petros Patounas, psychoanalyst of the School of the Freudian Letter, on his concerns regarding the polemics around the question of gender.

The second part of the series aims at examining in detail the manual of the APA in approaching people, adults and children, in relation to gender dysphoria. Patounas’ thesis regarding the main psychological approaches to gender dysphoria is that they are reducing the listener/psychologist into a simpleton without a voice; without a voice that could express something beyond their own opinion or a manualised dogma; a voice that can invite the subject to elaborate and examine their experience, bringing questions that allow them to clarify the desire at the core of their sense of being. This was one of the main ways Freud indicated for approaching the analysand’s structure. Patounas advocates that each remarkable articulation deriving from children, eg, their ideas of being a boy or girl in relation to the other sex, need to be examined within its contexts, conscious and unconscious, if psychologists want the best for those people that they are aiming to assist. It is here that psychoanalysis in the Lacanian orientation can facilitate the utmost appreciation of this discontent, which has exposed key blind spots of the Americanised way of approaching the human subject and its discourse.