Dr Patricia Gherovici
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Dr Gherovici is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. She is co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group and Associate Faculty, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania, Honorary Member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City, Member at Apres-Coup Psychoanalytic Association New York, and Founding Member of Das Unbehagen.
Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press: 2003) winner of the Gradiva Award and the Boyer Prize, and Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge: 2010). She has published two edited collections (both with Manya Steinkoler) Lacan On Madness: Madness, Yes You Can't ( Routledge: 2015) and Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (Cambridge University Press: 2016). Her new book Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference was published by Routledge in June 2017. www.patriciagherovici.com |
Public Lecture - Keynote Presentation –
Friday 23rd February 2018 - 19.00 to 21.00
Trans Desire: From the First Death to the Second Death.
Workshop
Sunday 25th February 2018 - 9.00 to 15.00
Depathologizing Trans: A Critical Analysis of Lacan’s and Millot’s Analyses of Transgender Cases
Today’s practitioners may not know that Lacan was the first psychoanalyst in France to work with a gender-variant patient who requested a sex-change. Moreover, Lacan intervened in a manner that expressed an ethics of sexual difference. With Henri, whom Lacan saw every week between 1952 and 1954, Lacan sketched the lineaments of a new theory of sexual identity. In a 1971 seminar, Lacan remarked that transsexuals have trouble with the phallus because they dispense with lack; they also confuse the actual organ with the signifier, meaning the material side of language. Lacan was aware that the transsexual demand for the surgical removal of attributes like the breasts or the penis can in some cases derive from an inability to use metaphors for those organs; they thus literalize the Freudian mechanism of castration. As a result, Lacanian psychoanalysts, led by Catherine Millot, started pathologizing transgender manifestations. The discussion of this workshop will be aimed at challenging the systematic pathologization of trans expressions by revisiting Lacan’s “transexuals” as well as examples from the presenter’s practice and from sex-change memoirs from the perspective of trans* psychoanalysis.
Bibliography:
Friday 23rd February 2018 - 19.00 to 21.00
Trans Desire: From the First Death to the Second Death.
Workshop
Sunday 25th February 2018 - 9.00 to 15.00
Depathologizing Trans: A Critical Analysis of Lacan’s and Millot’s Analyses of Transgender Cases
Today’s practitioners may not know that Lacan was the first psychoanalyst in France to work with a gender-variant patient who requested a sex-change. Moreover, Lacan intervened in a manner that expressed an ethics of sexual difference. With Henri, whom Lacan saw every week between 1952 and 1954, Lacan sketched the lineaments of a new theory of sexual identity. In a 1971 seminar, Lacan remarked that transsexuals have trouble with the phallus because they dispense with lack; they also confuse the actual organ with the signifier, meaning the material side of language. Lacan was aware that the transsexual demand for the surgical removal of attributes like the breasts or the penis can in some cases derive from an inability to use metaphors for those organs; they thus literalize the Freudian mechanism of castration. As a result, Lacanian psychoanalysts, led by Catherine Millot, started pathologizing transgender manifestations. The discussion of this workshop will be aimed at challenging the systematic pathologization of trans expressions by revisiting Lacan’s “transexuals” as well as examples from the presenter’s practice and from sex-change memoirs from the perspective of trans* psychoanalysis.
Bibliography:
- Dean, T. (2000). Beyond sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chapter 2: "Transcending Gender," pp. 61-93.
- Millot, C. (1990). Horsexe: Essays on transsexualism (K. Hylton, Trans.). New York: Autonomedia. Chapter 2: " The Female Drive in Psychosis", pp. 21-27 and Chapter 3, "Keys to Transsexuality," pp. 31-46.
- Schneiderman, S. (Ed.). (1980). Returning to Freud: Clinical psychoanalysis in the school of Lacan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chapter 1: A Lacanian Psychosis: Interview by Jacques Lacan, pp. 19-41.
- Shepherdson, C. (2000). Vital signs: Nature, culture, psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge. Chapter 3: The Role of Gender and the Imperative of Sex", pp. 85-113.