Western New England Psychoanalytic Society

This event addresses: Gender variances

Speaker: Eve Watson, PhD

Discussant: Oren Gozlan, PsyD

Sexuality for children and adolescents is a site of intense curiosity, brooding, and fluidity and it is not unusual for an intensive questioning of subjectivity to be supported by a gender-based identity query. Transitioning out of childhood and adolescence can be a significant challenge, added to by gender questioning. This talk explores the “queerness” of childhood in light of it as a periodicity of frustrations, perplexities, helplessness, abjections, and “defeats of appetite” and considers how this does not fit well with contemporary culture which promotes ideals and objects of happiness, pleasure, and choice. The talk will also explore the ethics specific to psychoanalysis which sometimes run counter to social ideals and the social “good.”