Berkeley Psychoanalytic Society
Exploring the Unconscious: Arts, Science and the Humanities
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Trans Psychoanalysis and Livable Embodiments
Saturday, March 3, 2018 @ 9:30 am - 11:30 am
“I had no choice. I would be dead if I hadn’t transitioned – I would have killed myself.” Drawing on her clinical experience as a psychoanalyst working with gender-variant analysands, Gherovici argues that those compelled to change gender often do it 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, the presenter 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.
SPEAKER
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. She is the Co-founder and Director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group, Associate Faculty Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania, and Honorary Member of IPTAR in New York City. Her books include: The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press, 2003) winner of the Gradiva Award and the Boyer Prize, Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010), Lacan on Madness: Yes You Can't (with Manya Steinokler, Routledge, 2015), Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (with Manya Steinokler, Cambridge University press, 2016), and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2017).