Trans* Psychoanalysis: A New Discipline?

2 CE credits for Licensed Psychoanalysts, Social Workers, and Psychologists 

“I had no choice. I would be dead if I hadn’t transitioned—I would have killed myself.” This clinical vignette is no longer exceptional. We are living a “transgender moment,” as headlines across the United States have called it, that is radically changing our notions of sex and gender. Trans* psychoanalysis does not imply that psychoanalysis should “treat” trans people with the intent of “curing” them; instead, it suggests that psychoanalysts have much to learn from what trans people have to say. In fact, the experience of analysands who identify as trans has the potential to reorient psychoanalysis. Drawing on her clinical experience as a psychoanalyst working with gender-variant analysands, Patricia Gherovici argues that those compelled to change gender often do so because they are facing the most crucial issues of life and death. What is at stake is less gender fluidity than finding a way of being. Challenging the pathologization of transgenderism historically enforced by psychoanalysis, Gherovici makes use of Lacan’s notion of the sinthome to propose an embodied ethics of desire capable of fundamentally rethinking sexuality by taking seriously the issue of mortality inscribed in sexuality.

Patricia Gherovici PhD, is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. She is co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group; Associate Faculty, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania; Honorary Member, IPTAR; Member, Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association; and Founding Member, Das Unbehagen. Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press, 2003), winner of the Gradiva Award and the Boyer Prize, and Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010). She has published two edited collections (both with Manya Steinkoler): Lacan On Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t (Routledge, 2015) and Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Her most recent book, Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference, was published by Routledge in June 2017.

PRACTITIONERS AND GENERAL PUBLIC: $20

Add to Cart

STUDENTS:

Free registration by email

Download flier