Working Psychoanalytically with Gender Diversity and Sexualities considers and challenges expectations about psychoanalytic work with LGBTQIA+ patients.
The book is organised into three parts, starting with a theoretical review, which includes discussion of the relevance of the Oedipus complex, resistance to infantile sexuality, the conquest of otherness and challenges in maintaining neutrality. Secondly, the contributors approach an ethical dimension, with chapters describing different moments in the way in which psychoanalysts engage with ethical responsibility in the face of gender and sexual diversity. The third part of the book considers an ontological dimension, that incorporates fluidity as a condition of the subject as an object of study and includes factors such as race and generational status, emergence of stigmas and a particular focus on the concept of helplessness. The contributors offer insight into countertransferential reactions and responses in clinical work, ensuring that analysts can work with these patients without preconceptions standing in the way.
Extending an opportunity to air conflicting psychoanalytic views and rethink established psychoanalytic concepts, this book will be key reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training. It will also be of interest to academics and students of psychoanalytic studies and gender studies.
Working Psychoanalytically with Gender Diversity and Sexualities considers and challenges expectations about psychoanalytic work with LGBTQIA+ patients.
Recenzijas
At a time when free thinking and a democratically legitimate, diverse culture are increasingly under threat worldwide, this book provides a scientifically sound wake-up call to preserve open thinking not only in our culture and society, but also within our psychoanalytic community. With their consistent plea for an opening and fluidity of psychoanalytic theory and practice in the realm of sexuality and gender, the authors repeatedly touch on the original field of psychoanalysis. At the same time, their multi-layered message is: we need resistance to arbitrariness in our psychoanalytic concepts, but also resistance to normative restriction in the diversity of innovative theories on socially new, often still incomprehended forms of sexuality and gender. This is an excellent book that cannot be pigeonholed into any psychoanalytic cliché, but opens up creative spaces for thought and life. - Dr. med. Heribert Blass, IPA President elect
The paradox at the heart of psychoanalysis--without resistance, there can be no cure; yet when resistance calcifies, the analytic process stalls--shapes every treatment, implicating both analyst and analysand. With candor and precision, the ten essays in this volumeauthored by a distinguished group of international clinicianstrace the evolving contours of resistance as it intersects with gender, embodiment, and the enduring question of sexual difference. It is, unmistakably, essential reading for the contemporary psychoanalyst. - Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D. psychoanalyst, Sigourney Award winner, and author of Transgender Psychoanalysis.
List of Contributors
Series editor preface
Introduction
Marco Posadas, Silvia Acosta and Frances Thomson-Salo
Part
1. Gender diversity and sexuality: theoretical revisions that include
diversity
Introduction
Angela Vila-Real
1. The Oedipus complex: an expanded approach on sexual and gender
polyphonies
Leticia Glocer Fiorini
2. Psychosexuality and the problem of (mis)representation: A mentalizing
perspective
Liz Allison
3. Encountering otherness: On the ability (and inability) for psychic
movement within sexual states of mind
Anat Schumann
4. Shapes of gender identity: Three stories with an impact
Domenico di Ceglie
Part
2. Psychoanalytic ethics and depathologising gender diversities and
sexualities: Intolerance as an unconscious response to violence in analytic
field
Introduction
Marco Posadas
5. The many colours of the rainbow: Depathologising sexual diversity
Sergio Lewkowicz
6. Towards a psychoanalytic ethics-based practice with transgender
individuals
Alessandra Lemma
7. A history of reception: Falling apart as the ground for learning
Oren Gozlan
Part
3. In search of complexity
Introduction
Nicolas Evzonas
8. Gender fluid and fixed: gender and suffering, gender and transformation
Adrienne Harris
9. Gender crossing as caesura versus gender crossing as cut
Dana Amir
a) Eva Reichelt Discussion
b) Elda Abrevaya Discussion
10. On Trying to Pass off Transphobia as Psychoanalysis and Cruelty as
Clinical Logic: Gender Dysphoria
Avgi Saketopoulou
Frances Thomson-Salo, Ph.D., is an adult and child psychoanalyst, European co-chair of the IPA Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies committee, and member of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis Board. She was an Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Melbourne, specialising in infant mental health.
Marco Posadas, RSW, MSW, PhD is a psychoanalyst based in Toronto, and inaugural chair of the IPA Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee. He received the 2018 Sue Fairbanks Excellence in Psychoanalytic Knowledge Distinguished Lecturer award, the 2022 Distinguished Social Worker for Toronto award, and is the 2024-2025 Antoinette Calabria visiting scholar for the Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas.
Silvia R. Acosta, PsyD, PhD is an Argentinian psychoanalyst, member of the SPP and the APC, a member of the IPA Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee, and a co-founder of the FEPAL Working Party on drive constellations and subjectivation processes. She has published psychoanalytic articles and teaches on sexual and gender diversity in Europe and Latin America.
