Dreaming gender: Restoration and transformation

Is gender made of and through the body or of and through attachments, relations, and cultures? Is the binary option a defensive reaction on the part of a conscious search to order the chaotic over-inclusiveness of the unconscious, or do implicit models condition our gender positions? Can the links among individual psyche, family context, and historical-social context produce a "normative unconscious"? This reflection on "gender binarism," nostalgia, transformation, and the search for an idiomatic resolution, in which gender is truly a personal construction, takes place in a tripled context: the fundamentalism and the antirelativism of Pope Ratzinger; the male gender role confusion of a 22-year-old analysand; and the "nonlinear" experience of being in the Web's virtual dimension. © 2007 The Analytic Press.