Yann Phesans interrogates the concept of therapeutic neutrality, combining personal history and clinical experience to offer an alternative.
All client details are altered, composite, and anonymised. Consent for composite use has been secured. Any resemblance to identifiable persons is coincidental.
Transference—classically defined as “the patient sees in his analyst the return, the reincarnation, of some important figure out of his childhood or past, and consequently transfers on to him feelings and reactions” (Freud, 1940, p. 174)—remains a cornerstone of psychotherapeutic theory and practice. Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud described transference as creating “an intermediate region between illness and real life” (Freud, 1914, p. 154), framing it as a universal, intrapsychic drama dependent on analytic neutrality. The analyst, ideally, was “a mirror… not meant to be seen, but to see” (Freud, 1912, p. 118). Yet, as Kimberlé Crenshaw has observed, such neutrality rested on the unmarked norm of the White, heterosexual, male subject (Crenshaw, 1991, 1297). Psychoanalysis, even when claiming universality, has always been situated in a particular context—rooted in bourgeois Vienna, accessible primarily to those whose social and economic positions aligned with the emerging practice (Rose, 1983; Frosh, 1997).
Critical perspectives challenge the myth of the neutral consulting room. Neil Altman reminds us that “race and class… are always in the room, and the only question is whether they are talked about or not” (Altman, 2000, 601). Franz Fanon (1952) made visible the extra burdens placed on minoritised subjects, who are “overdetermined from without” and must navigate an historico-racial schema imposed by the white gaze (p. 111), whilst Dorothy Evans Holmes (2019) foregrounds the analyst’s own subjectivity as a potent organiser of what is generated during analysis (Holmes, 2019, 238). These insights reveal transference as a co-constructed field shaped by experiences such as migration, queerness, racialisation, and class.
For me, these critiques are not theoretical abstractions but the lived conditions of training. As a queer immigrant therapist-in-training, analytic neutrality excluded my body, my accent, and my histories. Clinical encounters became sites where my identity, far from incidental, was central to the therapeutic dynamic.
This essay situates such experiences within two frameworks: Édouard Glissant’s ‘opacity’ and José Esteban Muñoz’s ‘disidentification’. Glissant articulates opacity as a right, challenging the Western compulsion to fully know and render the other’s subjectivity legible (Glissant, 1997, 194). Opacity is not secrecy; it is a principled refusal of the imperative for total understanding. Muñoz describes disidentification as a “performative mode of tactical recognition” that “neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it” but “works on and against dominant ideology” (Muñoz, 1999, 11).
Bringing these concepts into the consulting room, I ask: how can opacity and disidentification transform the therapeutic encounter from a site of coercive recognition into one that can hold ambiguity, honour refusal, and practise radical listening without mastery? Through an autoethnographic lens, I examine a clinical encounter in which my queer immigrant positionality became central, demonstrating that these frameworks are not merely academic—they are vital tools for navigating the intimate politics of therapy.
A Clinical Vignette: The Exception, the Rule, and the Countertransference
“Not like them,” she said.
Julie, a white British cis-woman in her thirties, entered therapy highly agitated. For months we untangled her experiences of male violence, colleagues who dismissed her grief as hysteria, and a family culture where emotional expression was treated as weakness. Her conscious, intellectual assessment was that I, her therapist, was “not like them.” She named my queerness, my non-imposing style, my perceived sensitivity—all factors that positioned me outside the archetype of the dominant men in her history. I was a safe harbour, an exception to the rule.
And yet, unconsciously, my refusal to perform the dominance she expected became, paradoxically, a new and infuriating form of control. I still summoned the spectre of those who had dominated her. Her rage was directed at my refusal to occupy the narrow position she was trying to assign me: her trauma-informed version of what a “man” should be. She was enraged by my opacity.
This is where countertransference—the therapist’s own emotional and transferential response—becomes essential. The temptation to comply with her projection was strong. I felt a visceral tug to perform a steadier, more traditionally masculine presence; simultaneously, another impulse urged me to resist. This countertransference stirred something raw and uncontainable. Julie, with her sharp gaze, became an uncanny mirror—not reflecting my client’s, but my own history. She reminded me of my sister—also white, cisgender, and assertive to the point of dominance—who had controlled the emotional climate of our childhood home. I felt the familiar resentment rise, the old urge to bite back against impossible demands.
I could feel my hand making a fist as her voice rose, but I could not retaliate. She was “like her—but not quite her.” I focused on my breathing, allowing the tension in my body to settle. As her therapist, my role required containing both her projected rage and my own countertransference. This demanded what Wilfred Bion theorized as the therapist’s capacity for reverie—to receive the client’s raw, unprocessed emotional experience, metabolise it without retaliation, and return it in a more manageable, thinkable form (alpha function) (Bion, 1962, 36).
My visceral urge was to resolve the tension either by assimilating—performing the masculinity she demanded—or opposing it outright—rebelling against her control, centring my own needs. Here, Muñoz’s concept of disidentification offered a critical third way: a practice of working on and against the script (Muñoz, 1999) . I could acknowledge her need for steadiness and safety (working on it) while simultaneously refusing the patriarchal form of masculinity she envisioned (working against it). I could be steady without being domineering; I could contain her anxiety without erasing my queer identity.
By holding my own opacity, I simultaneously preserved a space where her feelings, rage, and need for control could exist without being simplified, named, or appropriated. Practically, this involved tolerating the tension in the room, resisting the pull to perform the masculinity she demanded, and allowing her to engage with the full complexity of her emotions—a deliberate enactment of a ‘holding environment’ (Winnicott, 1969, 591). The holding environment was actively constructed through disidentification, creating room for both her transferential intensity and my conscious refusal to inhabit the patriarchal script she projected.
This labour is not only professional—it is deeply personal. As an immigrant and abuse survivor, I have learned that survival often depends on silence and making oneself smaller. In the consulting room, the stakes are existential: when tasked with holding the trauma of others without losing myself, who holds me? This question is the lived tension that underpins every moment of care work, echoing Adam Phillips’ observation that the healer must be both participant and observer, a stance necessitating a splitting of the self (Phillips, 2012, 45). My disidentification was dual: a clinical application of Bion’s containment for her benefit, and a personal, political act of self-preservation (Bion, 1962).
In holding my opacity, I was not merely refusing her demand; I was actively creating space where her trauma could coexist with my queerness, where her need for safety could be explored without reliance on the patriarchal formulas that had wounded us both.
Clinical Implications: Transforming Practice Through Refusal
The encounter with Julie illustrates how Glissant’s opacity and Muñoz’s disidentification move beyond theory into vital clinical practices in several concrete ways:
1. Redefining Therapeutic Goals
Therapeutic success must be freed from the imperative of coherence and legibility. Instead, the task may be to support clients in cultivating the right to opacity—the freedom to remain partially unknowable. This might involve helping clients disidentify from pathological labels imposed by oppressive systems. The goal becomes fostering tolerance of ambiguity rather than enforcing clarity.
2. Reframing Therapeutic “Resistance”
What is often labeled resistance may instead signal a refusal of the hierarchy that decides whose ways of being count as fully human. A client’s refusal to make themselves legible can be a safeguard of psychic integrity. This shift refigures resistance from a technical obstacle into a potential form of wisdom.
3. Reimagining the Therapist’s Use of Self
This approach demands politically attuned engagement with the therapist’s own social context. Identity cannot be treated as static background; the question must be ongoing: How are my race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, neurodiversity, and migration status shaping this dynamic? Such reflexivity echoes disability justice frameworks that insist mind-body diversity is not deficit but variation—requiring accommodation, not correction. The therapist’s role is not neutral mirror but engaged, reflexive participant.
4. Naming the Bargain of Recognition
Clinicians must help clients examine a situation where safety is offered in exchange for conformity to imposed categories. The central question becomes: Does this label expand the conditions of a liveable life, or does it purchase temporary safety at the cost of erasure? Therapy becomes a laboratory for interrogating these bargains without assuming their necessity.
5. Supervision and Collective Accountability
Refusal requires supervision that explicitly addresses the politics of disidentification. Practitioners must bring these moments into supervision, subjecting them to dialogue and challenge. No single therapist can reliably discern defensive opacity from liberatory practice in isolation. Collective accountability is therefore indispensable.
Ethical Cautions: The Limits of Refusal
Opacity and disidentification are not therapeutic absolutes. They must not be misused as excuses for withholding, disengagement, or obscurity. A therapist who refuses without explanation risks replicating abandonment and re-traumatisation. Refusal is ethically defensible only when deliberate, accountable, and oriented toward creating more relational possibility for both therapist and client. These tools demand rigorous self-reflection, disciplined practice, and supervision capable of distinguishing productive ambiguity from neglect.
Conclusion: Radical Listening as Political Practice
Psychotherapy is never politically neutral. Every interpretation, silence, and act of containment situates therapist and client within broader struggles over power, recognition, and belonging. The encounter with Julie shows how the consulting room becomes a micro-arena where identity, history, and power are negotiated in real time. Bringing Glissant and Muñoz into dialogue with psychoanalysis suggests that contemporary psychotherapy has much to learn from queer, disability, and decolonial thought. These traditions provide tools for navigating transference and countertransference in a socially stratified world.
Radical listening thus emerges as political practice. It means hearing without demanding transparency, sitting with contradiction, and honouring refusal. It is care that does not seek mastery but tolerates mystery. In a culture—and a clinical tradition—that equates health with legibility and assimilation, this offers a different promise: that therapy might become a space where ambiguity is not pathology but possibility, and where recognition is not purchased at the cost of erasure. This is not a departure from the clinical but a deepening of it. It insists that intimate therapeutic dynamics are inseparable from their social and political contexts. The consulting room is not retreat but crucible—a site where the conflicts of the world are concentrated and may be transformed.
About the author
Yann Phesans (he/they) is the lead psychotherapist and founder of Beyond Labels Therapy. A French-born queer clinician, educator, and writer, Yann works between the UK and the US and specialises in supporting queer and marginalised clients around identity, shame, and trauma. Their practice and research sit at the intersections of relational psychotherapy, critical theory, social justice, and the politics of lived experience.
www.beyondlabelstherapy.com
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