Gender for all against identity for oneself

Objectives. - Based on Vincent Bourseul's excellent text, this reflexion attempts to throw light on certain fundaments of the "gender" theorisations rather than simply discussing the different concepts and their contents. Methods. - In order to do so, we will rapidly review the historical elements of this notion, notably those of Greek antiquity in terms of "genos", which we consider as shaping and ever present in sociological, philosophical and psychoanalytical elaborations today. Results. - This short review underlines several points: the notion of gender has been stressed for very long and is not a modern preoccupation; one should differentiate gender, as it circulates in a society as a binary identity norm with notable intentionality, from that which is intrapsychic and multiple with its conflicting effects in an individual's mental constitution; finally that two important concepts of the differentiation of the sexes exist that produce very differing destinies of thought. Discussion. - Hence, it would appear that the fairly conflicting arena of questions regarding gender might only be a misplaced arena, another scene in which something more fundamental and more intimate in each of us may play, that of the difference between me and not-me and the mental destinies on the elaboration of the difference, of what is foreign, of otherness, etc. Conclusions. - The interest of these questions would be to understand the importance of questioning the fundaments of our thought, often in the form of an unconscious a priori, as well as the importance of questioning the predetermining historical and cultural dimensions in fields such as, for example, that of psychoanalysis as Borseul legitimately invites us to do. (C) 2014 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.