This scientific meeting presentation revolves around genders that self-describe as nonbinary, while also tracking the particular types of anxieties and difficulties that many analysts confront when encountering such patients who identify.
Avgi Saketopoulou PsyD. offers a psychoanalytic way of thinking about nonbinary genders, not through the idea of gender identity—a concept she will discuss as wildly problematic and even dangerous—but through the rubric of Laplanche's notion of self-theorization and with help from trans of color critique. When working with trans nonbinary patients, the analyst, she will propose, is asked to take sides: but with what? And how do we know that such side-taking stands to expand rather than foreclose psychic possibilities? With ample time for engagement with online participants, this presentation offers a fresh perspective on thinking about gender overall.
Learning Objectives
1. Participants will be able to explain why the concept of gender identity is problematic and even dangerous.
2. Participants will be able to discuss nonbinary gender, what it is and what it is not.
3. Participants will be able to explain the concept of "taking sides" and to list two reasons why such side-taking does not foreclose but in fact expands psychic possibilities.
4.Participants will be able to describe two countertransferential problems analysts face in working with nonbinary patients.
About the Presenter
Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York, NY. On faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, she is twice the recipient of JAPA's annual essay prize (2014, 2023). Avgi has been honored with APsA’s Ralph Roughton Award, the Symonds Prize, and the Ruth Stein Prize. In 2021 she received with Ann Pellegrini the IPA’s first Tiresias Prize for their co-authored essay that appears in expanded form in Gender Without Identity (The Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023). In 2021 she co-chaired, with Jonathan House, the first U.S.-based conference on the work of Jean Laplanche. She is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023). Her critical conversations with Dominique Scarfone appear in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the wake of Jean Laplanche (The Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023).
About the Moderator
Nancy C. Winters, MD, FIPA is a psychoanalyst in Portland, OR, a Training and Supervising analyst of the Oregon Psychoanalytic Institute and NPSI, and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Oregon Health and Science University.
She serves on editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP) and the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. Recent publications include co-editor and chapter author of the 2022 Gradiva award-winning "Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond" (2021), “Autoimmunity and its Expression in the Analytic Situation: Contemporary Reflections on Our Inherent Self-Destructiveness” (IJP, 2022), and "A Home to the Lie: The Contemporary (Per)version of Truth” (American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2023).