Actions Panel
Contemporary clinical approaches to working with trans-identified individuals.
By The Red ClinicFollow
When and where
Date and time
Monday, July 24 · 11am – 1pm PDT
Location
Online
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About this event
- 2 hours
- Mobile eTicket
Do psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic therapists have something substantive to contribute to trans people? ‘I doubt,’ writes McKenzie Wark expressing a popular opinion among trans-identified individuals, ‘that psychoanalysis has anything to offer trans people…it has the worst record […with] gatekeeping us, dismissing us, or practicing conversion therapy on us.’ Other trans scholars, like Kadji Amin, are seeing emerging possibilities in pioneering work that is redefining psychoanalysis’s basic assumptions on gender. Despite being avowedly anti-psychoanalytic, Amin is surprised to find that some recent work offers a “vision of clinical practice” that makes him and may make other trans-identified individuals too “wish to immediately enter therapy with [certain] psychoanalyst[s].”
This panel joins a growing movement advancing clinical approaches that strengthen rather than undermine the dignity of trans life, and which work towards a psychoanalysis that actively wants trans people. Recognising trans peoples’ deep and warranted distrust against our field, the speakers will offer us a psychoanalysis that can allow itself to be radically reconceived, thereby making itself welcoming to a broader range of subjects.
Avgi Saketopoulou is a New York City based psychoanalyst and therapist with extensive experience around trauma, queerness, gender diversity in adults and children. She teaches at the NYU PostDoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and is also on the faculties of several other psychoanalytic institutes, including the William Alanson White Institute, the Stephen Mitchell Relational Center, and the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, where she offers intersectionally-informed courses on psychosexuality and gender. She is the co-author (with Ann Pellegrini) of Gender Without Identity (2023) and author of Sexuality Beyond Consent (2023).
S.J. Langer is a writer and psychotherapist in New York City. He is in private practice where he also provides clinical supervision and WPATH GEI SOC7 Certified Mentorship. He is on faculty at School of Visual Arts in both the MPS Art Therapy and Humanities & Sciences departments. His research lab at SVA studies embodiment and trans phantoms. He is also part of the Faculty of Psychology for the Diploma in Psychotherapy and Mental Health in Sexual Diversity of Gender at Universidad Diego Portales – Centre for Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy Studies (CEPPS-Centro de Estudios en Psicología Clínica y Psicoterapia) in Santiago, Chile. He has published several peer-reviewed articles on clinical practice, gender theory and research on trans embodiment one of which, Trans Bodies and the Failure of Mirrors, was the winner of the Symonds Prize from Studies in Gender and Sexuality. He has chapters in the edited volumes Sex, Sexuality and Trans Identities, Interpersonal Psychotherapy: A Global Reach and Intersectionality in the Arts Psychotherapy. His first book Theorizing Transgender Identity for Clinical Practice: A New Model for Understanding Gender was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2020.
Geoffrey Hervey is a graduate student, community organizer, and mental health professional hailing from Memphis, TN. As a proponent of collective liberation, Geoffrey aims to uplift the mental health of marginalized groups of people through therapy and advocacy. Geoffrey has helped found community mental health organizations in Middle TN and is currently a Psy.D candidate at George Washington University.
Our chair is Lara Sheehi, Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University’s Professional Psychology Program where she is the founding faculty director of the Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab. Prof. Sheehi’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (2022) which won the 2022 Middle East Monitor’s Palestine Book Award for Best Academic Book. Prof. Sheehi is the President of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA, Division 39), the Chair of the Teachers’ Academy of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and co-editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Counterspace in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. She is also a contributing editor to the Psychosocial Foundation’s Parapraxis Magazine and on the advisory board for the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network and Psychoanalysis for Pride.
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