The Face of the (M)Other: Sex, Gender, and Terrors of Formlessness

This presentation explores the psychoanalytic work with two trans patients who struggled with intense “mirror anxieties”–overwhelming terrors of falling, decomposing, or seeing their faces disfigured. These “terrors of formlessness,” the presenter argues, can sometimes be stabilized through gender transition and body modifications. Because these experiences often remain inaccessible to direct representation, countertransference becomes a privileged route for encountering them. Evzonas shares a series of unsettling countertransference dreams in which his own face collapses before a mirror and his sense of personal continuity disintegrates. These dream experiences highlight the clinical risks: when the analyst does not adequately work through the death-associated elements circulating in the transference—hidden behind the masks of the masculine and the feminine—interpretations can veer into violence, projection, or even delusion.

Nicolas Evzonas (PhD in Literature and PhD in Psychopathology and Psychoanalysis) is a Greek Cypriot Paris-based psychoanalyst in private practice (French Psychoanalytical Association Institute, APF, IPA), and Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Paris. Nicolas has written numerous papers on clinical and applied psychoanalysis published in Greek, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan peer-reviewed journals, as well as essays on films, theatre, and literature. He is the author of the French book Devenirs trans de l’analyste [Trans Becomings of the Analyst], which is currently being translated in four European languages. He is also co-editor of the Psychoanalytic Inquiry issue on “Sexualities, Gender, Class, and Race: A Psychoanalytic View from France” (2020) and editor of a double special issue of The Psychoanalytic Review on “Trans* Becomings and Countertransference” (2021 & 2022). His latest projects are a guest-edited French-based issue for Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2023) on perversion and a forthcoming edited volume on Trauma and Sexuality (2026), which gathers together psychoanalytic clinicians and scholars from all over the world.