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Professional Development Committee and the Committee on Diversities and Inclusion 

present 

Gender and Sexuality Diversities Workshop

Puberty as Threshold: Psychoanalytic Considerations Regarding Hormone Blocking and Cross-Sex Hormones in Work with Transgender Children

Presenter: Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy. D.

Discussant: Mary Wyant, M.D.

Date/Time: October 15, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM CENTRAL TIME

Location: Virtual, via Zoom, from Dallas 

Credit Hours:   3 CMEs

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N.B.: DPC Members, Candidates, and Fellows: PLEASE remember to log into the Website in order to register for the event.

DPC Member $50.00

DPC Candidate/Fellow  $25.00

Non DPC Member $75.00

Non DPC Member (No CMEs) $25.00

Non DPC Student $25.00

Description: Psychoanalysis’s treatment of trans children and trans adolescents ranges from the moral panic that masquerades as psychoanalysis to facile, conceptually lazy “acceptance”. This presentation starts from the premise that both are problematic and insufficient, and proposes that the difficulty our field is experiencing around trans youth has to do with the challenges trans experience and embodiments pose to our metapsychology. Clinical material that spans a ten-year treatment of a trans child, will help flesh out the particular pressures transness places on psychoanalytic theorizing -around the sexual, embodiment, ethics, and psychic time- and offer enlarged pathways to clinical engagement with such children.

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will be able to consult and teach about developmental considerations entailed in working with transgender children.

2. Participants will be able to consult and teach about the relationship between binarizing thought vs. action when it comes to considering hormonal interventions, and the analyst's countertransferential fears and anxieties regarding children's medical transition.

3. Participants will be able to consult and teach about why, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the notion of "core gender identity" and a preoccupation with desistance or regret is both clinically unproductive and conceptually problematic.

References:

1. Saketopoulou, A. (2014). Mourning the Body as Bedrock: Developmental Considerations in Treating Transsexual Patients Analytically. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 62: 773-806.

2. Gill-Peterson, J. (2018). Introduction. Histories of the Transgender Child. University of Minnesota Press.

3. Blass, R., Bell, D. & Saketopoulou, A. (2021). Can we think psychoanalytically about transgenderism? An expanded live Zoom debate with David Bell and Avgi Saketopoulou, moderated by Rachel Blass. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 102(5), 968-1000.

4. Saketopoulou, A. (2022). Trying to pass off transphobia as psychoanalysis and cruelty as “clinical logic.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 91(1), 177-190.

Presenter Bio:  

An immigrant from Greece and from Cyprus, Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou is a psychoanalyst who lives and works in NYC. She is on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program, where she also trained, and teaches in several other psychoanalytic institutes including the William Alanson White Institute, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, and the Stephen Mitchell Center in NYC. Her published work has received several prizes, including the Ruth Stein Prize, the annual JAPA Essay Prize, APsaA’s Ralph Roughton Award, and the Symonds Prize. In 2021, the International Psychoanalytic Association awarded the first Tiresias prize to her essay, co-written with Dr. Ann Pellegrini. With Jonathan House, she co-chaired in 2021 the first US-based conference dedicated to the work of Jean Laplanche and she is the 2022 recipient of Division 39’s Scholarship Award. Her interview on relational psychoanalysis is part of the Freud Museum’s permanent collection in Vienna and her book, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia is forthcoming in February 2023 from the Sexual Cultures Series, NYU Press. 

Discussant Bio:

Graduate of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Dr. Mary Wyant is in private practice in Grapevine, Texas.  She did her psychiatry residency at UT Southwestern, and was graduated in 1995.  She initially worked in public mental health and was the first psychiatrist on the Assertive Community Treatment Team in Tarrant County, treating severely mentally ill patients just discharged from the state hospital.  This experience demonstrated to her that there are some severely distressed patients who will not recover, in spite of all the psychotropic medications they are taking, unless they can find a voice for their experiences and find someone able to listen. She did her psychoanalytic training at the Dallas Psychoanalytic Center, and was graduated in 2013. She is a personal and teaching analyst, faculty member (she teaches the Gender and Sexuality class), past chair of the Education Outreach Committee, and past President of the Center.