This is not a CSCSW Event. Please contact the Denver Psycholanalytic Society with any questions.
Title: Gender Without Identity, Development Without Developmentalism presented by Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD (Lecture)
Date/Time: April 12, 2024 from 7:00 – 8:30 PM (MT)
Location: Virtual using Zoom
Registration: https://www.denverpsychoanalytic.org/event-5506728
Description: This presentation, intended for psychoanalytically oriented mental health professionals, will address gender concepts through a psychoanalytic lens.
At this moment in time, conversations about gender are at the epicenter of heated debate and passionate conversation. At stake is gender's status as a concept (does gender matter, and if so, how?) and matters relating to gender development. Is gender an innate part of the self or one that is distorted by exposure, say, to drag queens and the wrong internet sites?
Psychoanalysis has unique insights to contribute to these questions and to the anxieties that underwrite them. In this presentation, Dr. Saketopoulou helps us navigate them by focusing on the theory and clinical implications of two key psychoanalytic ideas: the fiction of a core gender identity that determines what one's true and authentic gender is (be that cis, trans, or otherwise) and the idea of developmentally, predetermined gender endpoints.
This program will be followed by ample time for engagement with the audience.
Presenter Biography: Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou is a Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Avgi teaches in other analytic institutes such as the William Alanson White Institute and her work has received numerous awards including APsA’s Ralph Roughton award. The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association has twice bestowed her their best annual essay prize, in 2014 for her work with a 5-year-old trans girl and in 2023 for her paper on anti-racist racism. Her interview on psychoanalysis is in the collection of the Freud Museum in Vienna and she was co-chair of the first US-based conference dedicated to the work of Jean Laplanche. In 2021 she was co-recipient of the first Tiresias Prize from the IPA’s Sexual and Gender Diversities Committee, which appears in an expanded form in Gender Without Identity, co-authored with Dr. Ann Pellegrini (The Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023). Her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU press, 2023) braids psychoanalytic theory with philosophy, Black feminisms, and queer of color critique, and her conversational duets with Dominique Scarfone punctuate his essays in their book The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the wake of Jean Laplanche (The Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023).