27 RUE DE FLEURUS, A SALON MEETING OF THE CONTEMPORARY FREUDIAN SOCIETY
“Mourning the Body as Bedrock: Treating Massive Gender Trauma Psychoanalytically”
Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD
Thursday, October 2, 2014, 8:00 to 9:45pm, The Culture Center, 410 Columbus Ave (bet. 79 & 80th St), NYC
Psychoanalysis has traditionally treated the body as bedrock. Work with transgender patients however unsettles the centrality of the body’s materiality in the constitution of identity and psychic experience.
This presentation addresses these complexities by offering a detailed, in-depth account of the analytic treatment of a five-year-old girl, supplemented by material from the treatment of an adult transgender analysand. The work tracks the developmental implications when the discontinuities between natal body and gender experience remain unthinkable (Bion), exploring how unconscious fantasy may be defensively mobilized in ways that can be psychically catastrophic. The analytic task, I propose, is to help the patient psychically represent the de-linking of body from gender by offering a therapeutic disturbance in the fixity of the relationship between the soma’s material surfaces and gendered experience. Symbolism, language and memory can then enter these otherwise highly knotted psychic spaces.
Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou is an advanced candidate at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. In 2011, she was the recipient of the Ruth Stein Prize for promising new scholars in the study of sexuality, and in January 2014 she received the Ralph Roughton award from the LGBT committee of the American Psychoanalytical Association for her paper on developmental considerations in working with transgender patients. She is in private practice in NYC.
Program Fee: $20.00
Nancy Cromer Grayson and Debra Gill, Co-Chairs, Susan N. Finkelstein, Moderator
For additional information, please contact Debra Gill (212-534-0669 or debra.gill@gmail.com) or Nancy Cromer-Grayson (212-427-9023 or cromergrayson@gmail.com).
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The Contemporary Freudian Society
Salon Meeting – 10/2/14
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