In a recent episode of the Beyond Gender podcast, psychoanalyst and former Tavistock governor Marcus Evans describes the crisis in youth gender medicine as “the biggest scandal since the lobotomies of the 1950s”.[1] It is a striking phrase, and it captures the sense of unease that many clinicians now feel about an experimental approach that has been rolled out as if it were settled practice. Evans’ concerns are rooted in a long clinical career, and in his forthcoming book, Identity and the Foundational Myth, which explores gender distress as part of the perennial struggle to establish “an identity and mind of one’s own”, particularly in adolescence.[2]
Beyond Gender itself frames these debates as part of “a much bigger cultural shift”, linking questions about gender and identity to wider changes in psychology, medicine, and social life.[3] That wider frame is important. Yet even in this context, the primary focus often remains the individual: the distressed adolescent, the family in crisis, the clinician under institutional pressure. The mythic dimension, when it appears, tends to be treated as a personal narrative about identity rather than as a collective story in which all of us are already implicated.
From the standpoint of depth psychology, and especially in light of the differences between Freud and Jung, this is a crucial point. Evans stands broadly in the Freudian–Kleinian tradition: he works with unconscious conflict, early relationships, repression, defence, transference, and the way these play out in the consulting room. His emphasis on the “foundational myth” of a fixed, inner gender identity that must be unearthed and affirmed is a powerful critique of contemporary ideology. But it also raises a question that Jung would not have been able to ignore: whose myth is this? The individual’s, or the culture’s? And what is the psyche reaching for in these images?
This blog considers the Beyond Gender discussion with Marcus Evans from a Jungian–hermeneutic perspective. It suggests that, while an object-focused, individually oriented psychoanalytic model can shed light on repression and trauma, it risks becoming reductive if it neglects the symbolic and collective dimensions of psychic life. Jung’s work on the collective unconscious, myth, and the prospective function of the psyche invites us to widen the frame: away from asking only how a person functions, and towards asking what the psyche is seeking to become, personally and collectively, without colluding with delusion.
Evans’ Foundational Myth: Gender Distress and the Narrowing of the Psyche
Evans’ core argument, both in the Beyond Gender conversation and in his writing, is that the current focus on gender funnels a wide range of emotional and developmental problems into a narrow channel labelled “gender identity”. Adolescence is already a time when identity questions become acute, when young people “endeavour to find out who we truly are” whilst disidentifying from family and negotiating group pressures.[2],[4] For many, puberty feels like a “betrayal” by the body, as the changing physical form diverges from the imagined or wished-for self.[2],[5]
In this context, Evans suggests, the notion of an innate, inner gender identity offers a deceptively simple solution. Emotional pain, family conflict, shame, trauma, social anxiety, same-sex attraction, or a more diffuse sense of not fitting in can all be re-labelled as symptoms of being “born in the wrong body”. The “foundational myth” is the belief that there is a true self defined by gender, that this self is internally known and sovereign, and that the role of medicine and psychotherapy is essentially to recognise and facilitate its expression.
From a traditional Freudian point of view, this raises obvious questions about repression and defence. What is being warded off by this intense identification with a gender label? Which conflicts are being displaced onto the body? How do family dynamics, unconscious loyalties, and unresolved traumas contribute to the formation of such an overvalued belief? Evans’ critique of “affirmation-only” models is, in large part, a defence of the analytic space in which these questions can be explored, rather than short-circuited by institutional protocols and activist pressures.
On that basis, his contribution is invaluable. Repression of trauma can certainly be alleviated when the clinician works carefully with the object world: with parents, siblings, peers, teachers, and with the internalised figures that populate the patient’s psyche. The Beyond Gender discussion makes clear that many young people have never been offered such an exploration before being put on a medical pathway. The scandal, in Evans’ view, is not only the experimental nature of the interventions, but the abandonment of ordinary psychotherapeutic curiosity.
Freud, Jung, and the Question of Myth
Yet if Freud and his successors have been indispensable in illuminating how personal trauma and unconscious conflict shape psychic life, Jung insisted that this is not the whole story. The difference emerges most clearly around the question of myth.
For Freud, myth is fundamentally personal. It is a disguised wish, a collective dream that can be decoded back into infantile fantasy and primal scenes. When he reads the Oedipus myth, he sees the universal drama of the child’s desire and rivalry within the family. Myth is important, but it is ultimately subordinated to the model of the individual psyche and its developmental stages.
Evans’ use of the word “myth” in relation to gender is closer to this Freudian usage. The “foundational myth” is a seductive story about the self that both expresses and conceals deeper conflicts. In clinical work, one might gently loosen the patient’s attachment to this story, or at least explore what it protects them from feeling. The focus remains primarily individual and functional: how this myth helps or hinders the person’s capacity to think, to relate, to tolerate ambivalence, to live with a body that is felt as strange.
Jung’s approach is different. For him, myth is not simply a personal narrative projected onto the world. It is the language of the collective unconscious, the deep strata of shared human experience that shape not only individual psychology but culture itself. Myths are not merely disguises for private fantasies; they are symbolic expressions of archetypal patterns that operate across history, religions, and civilisations.
From this perspective, the contemporary fixation on gender identity cannot be understood solely as an aggregate of personal stories. It is also a collective myth in formation. The image of the “trans child”, for example, has taken on a powerful symbolic charge in public discourse. It functions as a kind of sacred figure, demanding affirmation and sacrifice, promising redemption through transition, and threatening calamity (suicide, social shame, accusation of “conversion therapy”) if not properly recognised. This is not simply an individual self-description. It is a cultural archetype, carrying fantasies of innocence, purity, transformation, and salvation.
Jung would ask: what does this myth tell us about the state of our collective psyche? Which anxieties, hopes, and disowned conflicts are being condensed into this figure? To treat it only as a personal narrative is to miss its wider significance, and to risk pathologising individuals for carrying something that actually belongs to the culture as a whole.
The Collective Unconscious and the Under-Explored Imaginal Field
Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious is not a loose metaphor for “social influences”. It refers to a structured layer of the psyche that expresses itself in universal images and motifs: the Great Mother, the Hero, the Trickster, the Child, the Shadow, the Anima and Animus, the Self. These patterns appear in dreams, fantasies, religious visions, works of art, and cultural narratives, often with striking similarity across very different societies.
In the present debate about gender, we see an extraordinary proliferation of new symbols, identities, flags, pronouns, and rituals. The sheer intensity of feeling around these signs suggests that more is at stake than individual self-expression. Something in the collective psyche is seeking representation. Yet, as Evans’ discussion illustrates, the dominant clinical frame remains individual and functional. We ask whether this or that young person meets criteria for dysphoria, whether their belief is “fixed and persistent”, whether they have co-morbidities, whether they are Gillick-competent.
We rarely ask what our myths, dreams, and cultural artefacts are saying about the transformation that is trying to emerge at a deeper level.
In that sense, collective myths and creative expressions are under-explored. Clinical accounts focus on personal histories and diagnostic categories, while the imaginal field in which these dramas unfold is treated as background noise. Jung would have been puzzled by this neglect. For him, paying attention to the symbolic life of a culture is an essential part of psychological responsibility. Without it, the burden of carrying unprocessed collective material falls disproportionately on vulnerable individuals, who then present to clinics as “cases”.
This does not mean that gender distress is “just” a metaphor, or that people’s suffering is unreal. It means that personal suffering is often amplified by the way a culture fails to metabolise its own images. When a society cannot consciously work with its myths, those myths work themselves out unconsciously, often in destructive ways.
Beyond Repression: The Prospective, Symbolic Psyche
Another key difference between Freud and Jung concerns the direction of explanation. Freud’s model is largely retrospective. Symptoms are traced back to earlier traumas, conflicts, and forbidden wishes. Relief comes when repressed material is brought into consciousness, and when the patient can recontextualise their history. Even when Freud acknowledged the role of fantasy, his emphasis stayed on how the past shapes the present.
Jung did not deny the importance of trauma and childhood experience, but he became increasingly interested in what he called the prospective function of the psyche. Dreams, fantasies, and symptoms do not only point back to what has been; they also anticipate what is trying to come into being. They are attempts by the unconscious to compensate for one-sidedness in the conscious attitude and to orient the person towards a more whole future.
From this Jungian point of view, an object-centred, trauma-focused approach such as Evans’, while clinically necessary, is not sufficient. It can explain how certain patterns arose and why they are so tenacious. It can help to release repressed affect and loosen defensive structures. But it does not, on its own, explain the psyche’s “corrective capacity” – its tendency to seek balance, to push towards integration, to generate new symbols that point beyond the present impasse.
In cases of gender distress, for example, one might understand transition fantasies partly as an attempted solution to unbearable conflict: a magical way of escaping shame, trauma, or unresolved ambivalence about sexuality. But from a Jungian perspective, one would also ask what legitimate desire is hidden in this fantasy. Is there a genuine need for a different way of being embodied, of relating to masculinity or femininity, of integrating anima/animus qualities that the surrounding culture has not yet learned to support? What aspects of the Self are seeking recognition through these images, and how might they find expression without requiring drastic alteration of the body or wholesale rejection of reality?
This is the hermeneutic task: not to take the fantasy literally, but not to dismiss it either. Instead, one asks what it might be saying symbolically about the person’s development and about the culture that has formed them.
Jung’s Hermeneutic Question: What is the Person Seeking to Become?
Jung’s method is often described as a hermeneutics of the psyche. Rather than imposing a fixed theory, he approaches dreams, images, and narratives as texts to be interpreted, always with the question: “What is the unconscious seeking to express here? What is trying to be born?” This is not a sentimental exercise. He is clear that one must not “affirm” the literal content of delusions or enact every fantasy that arises. To do so would be to collapse symbol into fact and to abandon the critical function of consciousness.
In his clinical work, Jung frequently encountered patients whose visions or beliefs were grandiose, paranoid, or fragmented. Instead of contradicting them flatly, he tried to understand the symbolic intention behind the disturbance. Psychosis, for him, could sometimes be a failed attempt at individuation, an eruption of archetypal material that consciousness was not yet able to contain. The task was to support the patient in building enough ego strength and symbolic capacity to work with these contents, rather than being possessed by them.
Applying this attitude to gender-related presentations would not mean endorsing the literal belief that one can change sex, or that a child’s declaration of identity is self-validating and beyond question. It would mean asking: what is this person trying to become? Which aspect of their psychic life is being exaggerated, defended, or disowned through this particular symbolic configuration? How has the cultural myth of gender identity captured their imagination, and what does that reveal about both them and us?
Such an approach refuses both naïve affirmation and crude pathologisation. It acknowledges that, within the experience of gender distress, there may be genuine insights about how we live masculinity and femininity, how we handle difference, how we relate to our bodies. But it also insists that these insights can only be integrated if we keep the symbolic dimension open, rather than collapsing everything into functional categories of diagnosis and treatment, or into ideological slogans.
Opening the Discussion: From Functional to Symbolic Psychology
The Beyond Gender episode with Marcus Evans raises an important alarm about the current state of gender medicine. It highlights the institutional capture of clinical services, the erosion of psychotherapeutic thinking, and the pressures on professionals to endorse an activist script. In this sense, Evans’ intervention is deeply in line with Freud’s insistence on facing uncomfortable truths about sexuality, aggression, and dependency, rather than colluding with cultural defences.
However, if we stop at this functional, individually focused critique, we miss an opportunity. The crisis around gender is not only a matter of poor safeguarding, flawed protocols, or misapplied diagnostic categories. It is also a crisis of meaning. Our culture is struggling to articulate what it means to be embodied, sexually differentiated, and related to others in a rapidly changing technological and social environment. The myths that previously anchored identity have lost their authority, and new myths are rushing in to fill the vacuum.
From a Jungian–hermeneutic standpoint, the discussion therefore needs to be widened. Alongside clinical audits and policy reviews, we need research into the symbolic life of this moment: the recurrent motifs in young people’s dreams, the imagery of online subcultures, the narratives of detransitioners, the iconography of activism, the representation of gender in contemporary art and media. These are not mere epiphenomena. They are expressions of the collective unconscious that can help us understand what is actually at stake.
Furthermore, clinicians working with gender distress might benefit from integrating a more explicitly symbolic perspective into their practice. Rather than treating identity claims only as statements to be verified or falsified, they can be approached as imaginal constructions that carry multiple layers of meaning. This does not mean treating patients as if they are characters in a myth, or ignoring the practical realities of their lives. It means recognising that the psyche speaks in images, and that reducing these images to simple functions—symptoms to be removed, errors to be corrected, or truths to be affirmed—does violence to their complexity.
Evans’ emphasis on early development, family dynamics, and the need for space to think can be enriched by Jung’s sense of the psyche as both retrospective and prospective, both personal and collective. The question is not only “What happened to you?” but also “What are you being called towards?” and “Which collective story are you carrying?”
Holding the Individual and the Collective Together
The Beyond Gender conversation with Marcus Evans offers a clear and necessary critique of current approaches to gender distress. It exposes how an unexamined foundational myth—the belief in a discoverable, internal gender identity that must be affirmed—has come to dominate clinical practice, sidelining ordinary psychotherapeutic work. It calls for a return to careful, exploratory engagement with the person’s history, relationships, and internal conflicts.
From the vantage point of depth psychology, and particularly in light of the differences between Freud and Jung, this is only part of the picture. Freud teaches us to attend to repression, defence, and the afterlife of childhood trauma. Jung reminds us that the psyche is also oriented towards the future, that it expresses itself symbolically, and that it participates in a collective field of images that shape both culture and the individual.
If we over-emphasise myth as a purely personal construction, we risk ignoring the collective forces that are currently constellating around gender. If we focus only on the functional aspects of the psyche—on diagnosis, impairment, and the restoration of ordinary functioning—we risk neglecting the unconscious possibilities that are being sought, however clumsily, through the very fantasies that disturb us. The task is to hold both together: to safeguard individuals from harm, to challenge delusional beliefs where necessary, and at the same time to listen carefully to the symbolic content of their experience and to the wider cultural myths in which they are entangled.
Jung’s hermeneutic approach would not ask us to affirm every self-description, nor to medicalise every deviation from gender norms. It would ask us to read our current crisis as a text: to ask what it reveals about our collective relationship to the body, to sex, to difference, to authority, and to the unknown future. In doing so, we might begin to move beyond a narrow focus on individual functionality towards a richer understanding of the psyche as a symbolic, meaning-seeking reality—one that is always, in its own way, trying to correct us, and trying to show us what we could yet become.
Endnotes
[1] “The Biggest Scandal Since Lobotomies – Tavistock Whistleblower Marcus Evans”, Beyond Gender podcast (Stella O’Malley, Mia Hughes, Bret Alderman). Episode description and promotional materials emphasise Evans’ characterisation of recent gender medicine practices as comparable, in scandalousness, to mid-twentieth-century lobotomy practices.
[2] Evans, M. (2025, forthcoming). Identity and the Foundational Myth: Psychoanalytic Insights into Gender Distress. Phoenix Publishing House / Karnac. Book descriptions highlight adolescence, identity struggles, and the tendency for a focus on gender to funnel a broader field of distress into a single explanatory domain.
[3] Beyond Gender podcast overview. The show presents itself as an exploration of how debates around gender, identity, psychology, and medicine connect to wider cultural shifts and questions about mental health and society.
[4] Evans, M. & Evans, S. (2021). Gender Dysphoria: A Therapeutic Model for Working with Children, Adolescents and Young Adults. The later book builds on this earlier clinical work, applying developmental and psychodynamic interpretations to gender-related distress.
[5] Multiple bookseller and publisher summaries of Identity and the Foundational Myth emphasise that adolescents can experience puberty as a betrayal by their bodies, and that gender-focused explanations can sometimes obscure more fundamental identity conflicts and relational issues.
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