Queer Theory and Psychoanalysis: Intersections and Controversies

Event Description

IPTAR-Q and the IPTAR Clinical Center present a daylong workshop on queer theory and its thorny relationship to psychoanalysis. All of the presenters are IPTAR members or candidates who are deeply invested in thinking about how Freudian psychoanalysis intersects with queerness as a mode of thought. Sam Semper, Co-Director of the IPTAR Clinical Center, will moderate the workshop. There will be four talks before lunch, in which each presenter will take up in their own ways the challenges of crossing queer theory and psychoanalysis in order to reconceptualize: notions of self as gendered and sexual (Brian Kloppenberg); queer temporality (Anna Fishzon); Foucault’s criticism of the modern incitement to speak sex as the truth of the self, a criticism in which psychoanalysis is deeply implicated (Ann Pellegrini); as well as trans and race in spaces both queer and psychoanalytic (Yukari Yanagino). After lunch, Max Malitzky will present an in-depth case along with his supervisor, Alan Bass, in order to show some of the ways in which the non-normative and non-essentialist modes of queer theory inform Freudian analytic practice.

Biographies

Alan Bass, PhD teaches in the philosophy department of the New School for Social Research and is a training analyst and faculty member the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the Contemporary Freudian Society. He is the author of three books: Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (2000); Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care (2006); and Fetishism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy: The Iridescent Thing (2018). He is the editor of The Undecidable Unconscious.

Anna Fishzon, PhD is an advanced candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-siecle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She has taught history and comparative literature at Williams College, Columbia University, and Duke University. Her articles have appeared in Slavic Review, Russian Literature Journal, Slavic and East European Journal, Laboratorium, and other academic publications. Anna is editing the volume, The Queerness of Childhood: Essays from the Other Side of the Looking Glass with Emma Lieber. She is the cohost of the podcast New Books in Psychoanalysis and editor of The Candidate Journal.

Brian Kloppenberg is a training analyst and faculty member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. He also teaches at the School for Visual Arts’ MA Program in Critical Theory and the Arts. His publications have appeared in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Psychoanalytic Psychology, and The Undecidable Unconscious. He is the chair of IPTAR-Q.

Max Malitzky, PsyD is an associate member at IPTAR, where he teaches in the Adult Program and the Respecialization Program.

Ann Pellegrini, PhD is Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. She is also a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Her books and articles traverse several disciplines and interdisciplines, but one through-line is an abiding interest in exploring how feelings are lived, experienced, and communicated between and across bodies—and with what risks and possibilities for self and others. Another is the value of the aesthetic for repairing democratic social life.

She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997); co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (NYU Press, 2003; Beacon Press, 2004); and co-author, with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico, of “You Can Tell Just By Looking” and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon Press, 2013). “You Can Tell Just By Looking” was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Non-Fiction. She has also published two anthologies: Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, co-edited with Daniel Boyarin and Danial Itzkovitz (Columbia University Press, 2003); and Secularisms, co-edited with Janet R. Jakobsen (Duke University Press, 2008). Pellegrini co-edits the “Sexual Cultures” Series, at New York University Press, with Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o. She is also co-editor of the journal Studies in Gender and Psychoanalysis. She’s currently completing a new book on “queer structures of religious feeling.”

Sam Semper, PhD, LP, FIPA is a member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and Co-Director of IPTAR’s Clinical Center. She is a Clinical Supervisor and Faculty in IPTAR’s Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Program and an Instructor in the Respecialization Program. She is an editor of The Candidate Journal. She sees adults, adolescents, and children in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in private practice.

Yukari Yanagino, PhD is a faculty member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education at New York University Medical School and an associate member at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She is also a clinical supervisor at the Institute for Human Identity, conducting research to develop psychoanalytically therapeutic protocols that are relevant to the treatment of transgender and gender non-conforming patients. She is a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association.

Learning Objectives

1. Identify some of the crucial ways in which Freudian psychoanalysis has informed the development of queer theory.

2. Identify some of the crucial ways in which queer theory has effectively critiqued certain aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis.

3. Explore ways in which queer thinking can productively inform Freudian analytic practice.

RSVP LINK: https://iptar.org/event/queer-theory-and-psychoanalysis-intersections-and-controversies/

CE Credits: 3

Social Workers: The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers (#SW-0226).

Licensed Psychoanalysts: The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychoanalysts (#P-0011).

Licensed Creative Arts Therapists: The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed creative arts therapists (#CAT-0037).

Licensed Mental Health Counselors: The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed mental health counselors. (#MHC-0112).

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