The Transgender Psychoanalysts are Coming!

The Transgender Psychoanalysts are Coming!
Hosted by Pulsion
Friday, March 28, 2024
6:30–8:30 PM

Location: The Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis has been a long-contested site within queer and transgender scholarship, as it has notoriously advanced some of the most explicitly pathologizing approaches to non-normative gendered and sexual psychic lives. Yet psychoanalysis has also enduringly captured the attention of diversely situated politicized and liberatory theorists. These thinkers have laboured to subvert its otherwise repressive applications, moving psychoanalysis outside of dogmatic clinical realms to explore its more expansive social uses.

Join a panel of trans clinicians and psychoanalytic theorists at a NYC launch for a new collected volume, The Queerness of Psychoanalysis. Panelists will present their chapters from the volume, followed by a discussion on the past, present, and future of the field for transgender analysts. We will consider what clinical psychoanalysis may accomplish if it is put squarely and unapologetically into transgender people’s hands. The panelists will address topics most pertinent to trans people’s psychological survival within our current cultural climate, including self-articulations of trans childhood, the systemic exclusion of practicing trans clinicians, and the psychological formations of transphobia. In so doing we may overturn our shared psychoanalytic cis-tuation and contribute to a more pluralistic field.

In person presentations planned by volume co-editor Myriam Sauer, and contributors Griffin Hansbury, Tobias Wiggins, and M. E. O’Brien.

The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) is an exploration of psychoanalysis’ often complicated and fraught history with thinking about queerness, as well as its multifaceted heritage.

Myriam Sauer (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the Latin‑America Institute of Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, as well as a writer and poet. Her first novel, entitled Passage durch den reißenden Strom (A Torrential Passage), came out in Fall 2023 with Querverlag. She recently edited, alongside Elisabeth Punzi and Vanessa Sinclair, the collected volume, The Queerness of Psychoanalysis. Her primary academic interests lie in the fields of psychoanalysis, sociology, queer studies, literature, and philosophy.

Griffin Hansbury, LCSW‑R (he/him) is a psychoanalyst in practice since 2001. As an internationally recognized expert on trans identity, he was the first psychoanalyst to widely publish as openly transsexual. His writing on the subject has advanced the field, appearing in several peer‑reviewed journals, including The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, The Psychoanalytic Review, and TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. His article “The Masculine Vaginal: Working With Queer Men’s Embodiment at the Transgender Edge” has been translated and published in several countries, including Argentina, Germany, and Italy. He is also the author of several books, including Vanishing New York and Feral City, under his pen name Jeremiah Moss, and the novel Some Strange Music Draws Me In. He lives in New York City.

M.E. O’Brien, PhD, LCSW (she/her) is a practicing analytic clinician in New York City. She has two books, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communization of Care (Pluto Press, 2023), and the co‑authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). She is also on the editorial collective at Pinko, a magazine on gay communism. She completed a PhD at New York University, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City’s LGBTQ social movements. She is currently a psychotherapist, a licensed clinical social worker, and in formation as an analyst. She is a candidate at Pulsion, a psychoanalytic institute in New York City.

Tobias Wiggins, PhD (he/him) is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Athabasca University (AU) in Alberta, in Canada. His research specializations include transgender mental health and sexuality, psychoanalysis, research-creation, queer visual culture, and cisgender psychology. Broadly, Wiggins’ work aims to address the continued pathologization of gender diversity and advocate for trans-competent care. His recent scholarly outputs include contributions to significant trans anthologies like The Queerness of Psychoanalysis (2024), Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care (2023), Sex, Sexuality and Trans Identities (2020); journals including Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2022), The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (2021), and Transgender Studies Quarterly (2020); as well as well as community-based publication projects and digital storytelling.