Courses

Femininity and its Discontents: Gendering, Un-gendering, Re-gendering

3 sessions | Ann Pellegrini ([email protected])

Language: English

Jumping off from Freud’s late lecture on “Femininity,” and putting psychoanalytic accounts of gender formation into contact with Black feminism (via Hortense Spillers), this three-unit course examines the vicissitudes of binary gender to illumine the racialized labor that goes into generating so-called cis-genders.

Schedule:

• September 7, 2025
• September 14, 2025
• September 21, 2025

Social Character and Its Disorders

4 sessions | Carter Carter ([email protected])

This is, partly, a course about character (i.e. personality) disorders and their treatment, a very practical course designed for working clinicians.  But it is a course about character disorders that takes seriously the matter of social character, the ways in which cultures and structures and histories constitute individual personalities.  From this perspective, character disorders can never just be understood individually; they need to be understood as being substantially a reflection of social character, as the disorders of a society (dis)organized in a particular way.  This, in turn, has profound implications for how clinicians approach (or don’t) their treatment.  We will likely be reading papers by Erich Fromm, Frantz Fanon, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Peter Fonagy, Otto Kernberg, Tanya Luhrmann, Lynne Layton, Hanna Pickard, and others. 

Schedule:

• September 28, 2025
• October 5, 2025
• October 12, 2025
• October 19, 2025

The Liminal Space within the Black and White Binary

2 sessions | Chanda Griffin ([email protected])

1. This course will discuss the social constructions of whiteness and “blackness,” as well as anti-blackness as part of a global belief system. The course will examine how anti-blackness undergirds an entire belief system that extends beyond race.
2. The 2nd class will discuss, more specifically, anti-blackness and psychoanalysis, followed by working with patients and dissociated anti-blackness.

Schedule:

• October 26, 2025
• November 2, 2025

Conceptualizing gender identity in psychoanalysis past and present

2 sessions | Jess Olson ([email protected])

The first is an overview of the history of gender and sexual identities in psychoanalysis and medicine, and the second a continuation of the course which focuses on the clinical intersection of current discourse on gender and identity with clinical approaches, using case studies as the organizing content for a theoretical exploration. The two courses will be designed to be linked by integrating the history of trans medicalization and limitations (and failures) as a framework for thinking clinically about current clients.

Schedule:

• November 23, 2025
• November 30, 2025

Otherwise, we are out of time: Deconstructing the Western European concepts of self, temporality, and sanity

3 sessions | Adrian Sanchez and Nicole Nelson ([email protected] & [email protected])

“I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.”—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (1952) names the tyranny of being stuck in a “zone of non-being.” This zone, described as an arid wasteland, is a symbolic and social zone where the marginalized person is “overdetermined from without,” denied ontological presence, and psychically dislocated. We will examine three constructs that have been essentialized from a white heterosexual cisgendered temporarily able-bodied Western European perspective: the self, temporality, and sanity/mental health. Three constructs are highly influential but normally unreflected upon in psychoanalysis. Self: “They never saw me. I was tired of being made to feel ashamed. I have begun my own quiet war.” —Sanda Cisneros, The House on Mango Street  In the Western European tradition, the self is seen as autonomous, rational, and individualistic with also having a distinct private inner life. This idea of self emphasizes personal freedom, introspection, and the capacity for self-development, experiences that have been assumed to be universal by those with more centrally socially located identities (i.e., white, cisgender, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, neurotypical, of certain socioeconomic statuses), but they are often denied to those with marginalized identities. In deconstructing this view of the self, we will explore other perspectives that propose instead that identity is shaped by collective experience, mutual interdependence, and the negotiation of power within diverse social, cultural, and historical contexts. We will also discuss affective resistance—valuing particularly marginalized or devalued emotions such as anger and (non capitalistic) joy—as a form of political resistance and reclamation of dignity. Temporality: “Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind.” —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man Colonial temporality emphasizes a linear timeline, with an supposedl inevitable desired progress towards modernity, capitalism, and rationality. The future is something that is owned by the colonizer, and those colonized, it is assumed, will either catch up, submit to being “civilized,” or be left to their own dust. Temporality, because it is a central structuring experience, plays an essential role in struggles for self-determination. In addition to exploring the power and politics of temporality, breaking the grip of chrononormativity and chronocentrism, we will explore diverse conceptualizations of temporalities: multiple, cyclical, fractured, liminal, non-linear, existing either outside of settler time an/or in liminal cracks. Sanity: “A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.” —Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House Contemporary definitions of mental health are generally medicalized, individualistic, racist, misogynistic, and of course, ableist (to name just a few of the problems!). As the mental health field has been exported to the Global South, necessary pushback about these relatively unquestioned norms of “sanity” has grown. The definition of “normalcy” and “health,” especially mental “health,” as well as the designation of who is mentally “healthy,” is just as socially constructed and saturated in colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism as the white Western European definitions of “self” and “temporality.” In fact, “sanity” is something that should be actively interrogated to understand how it is used to marginalize, coerce, and oppress people. Discussing relevant concepts from Mad Studies, Fat Studies, Critical Disability Studies (including Crip Theory), Queer Studies, intersectionality theory, and decolonial theory, we explore the potentialities that emerge as we value the voices of those labeled “mad,” refuse to define anything that could be called a norm of sanity, start liberating psychology and psychoanalysis from neoliberal intrusions, understand that all health is embedded in socio-structual issues and histories, and center our processes on empowering, both communities and individuals.

Schedule:

• December 7, 2025
• December 14, 2025
• December 21, 2025

Mapping the Body

2 sessions | Faculty ([email protected])

Introduction to Neuropsychoanalysis – 1st class meeting

This course will provide the basics of Neuropsychoanalysis and Affective Neuroscience. The theories of Friston, Panksepp, Solms, Fotopoulou, and Tsakiris have created a robust clinical application for psychoanalysis. The concepts of predictive processing, primary emotional systems, mentalization, and the Default Mode Network will be outlined, and we will explore the clinical application of these on psychopathology, ego functions, dreams, and embodiment.

Mapping the body – 2nd class meeting

Mapping the body – This course will work from a Neuropsychoanalytic frame, particularly the Free Energy Principle and predictive processing. Working from this frame, we will examine how we feel, map and interpret our bodies, with special attention on gender. Using clinical examples as well as illustrations through art, performance, dance, and film, we will explore how we apply this theory to help patients become more embodied and for analysts to engage analytically with the body.

Schedule:

• November 9, 2025
• November 16, 2025

Decolonial Feminist Killjoys

4 sessions | Lara Sheehi

Decolonial Feminist Killjoys learns from and documents how colonized and racialized people of and from the Global South (with attention to the intersecting dimensions of race, class, gender, sexuality and ability) engage in “psychic refusals” against domination, exploitation and coercion. Borrowing from Sara Ahmed’s popularized conceptualization of feminist presence as generatively disruptive, the course will read the varied ways in which feminist killjoys engage in life-sustaining refusals meant to denaturalize the oppressive conditions in which their lives are otherwise circumscribed. The course will immerse us in theoretical contributions from feminist killjoys with a focus on the psycho-politico-affective textures of their interventions. Many of these interventions will be “obvious” in as much as they outwardly disrupt cisheteronormativity, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. Other interventions will provide a space for us to evocatively rework texts, “queering” their normative engagement. For example, we will read seminal and contemporary psychoanalytic texts; through our praxis, we will work together to excavate decolonial feminist killjoy textures that may otherwise not be immediately apparent in these texts.

Schedule:

• January 11, 2026
• January 18, 2026
• January 25, 2026
• February 1, 2026

Critical Childhood Studies for Clinicians

2 sessions | Avgi Saketopoulou ([email protected])

Psychoanalytic clinicians are rarely, if ever, exposed to critical childhood studies. This is a loss because childhood studies can help analytic thinkers take a critical distance from theories of childhood, to notice the political lining, ideological undercurrents, and normative assumptions built into clinical theory and praxis. This course will introduce students to critical childhood studies, a domain of scholarly inquiry that makes its home in the interstices between disciplines and which will help fine-tune our ability to think about children and childhoods. We will discuss the difference between the figure of the Child and actual children – a distinction psychoanalysis does not make – and take inventory of the problems that inhere in conflating the two. Relatedly, we will delve into classic readings over how the figure of the Child is constructed, what political agendas it lifts up and which ones it obscures, and how such discourses do the work of subsuming actual children into rhetorics of security and futurity. Such logics, all of which are gendered, racialized, and organized through settler colonial ideologies, will help us discern what work the Child (and by extension, developmental theory) is asked to do to prop up heteronormativity, capitalism, and the nation state. The point is not to discard what psychoanalysis teaches us: it is, rather, to sharpen our ability to detect how the figural Child is baked into analytic thinking and how analytic theories of development can sometimes neglect actual children, effectively hurting them, all in the interest of the Child. As such, this class is not addressed only to those working with children and adolescents per but, really, to anyone interested in psychoanalysis and its politics more broadly. Classic texts by Lee Edelman, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Jules Gill Peterson and Camille Owens will be discussed in their own right and then put in conversation with analytic ideas of childhood and child work.

Schedule:

• February 8, 2026
• February 15, 2026

Urgently co-creating psychoanalysis

4 sessions | Jyoti Rao ([email protected])

The contemporary moment demands a psychoanalysis capable of engaging with pressing global, social, and individual events. Listening to the immediacy of everyday life, how might we use what we hear to shape our understanding of ourselves as psychoanalytic subjects, theorists, and creators? What experiences unsettle us the most, and what sorts of investigations do these require? Using social dreaming, writing prompts, close reading, and other methods, we will explore ways to use experiences of urgency to dynamically shape psychoanalytic inquiry and develop new forms of practice.

Schedule:

• February 22, 2026
• March 1, 2026
• March 8, 2026
• March 15, 2026

Psychoanalytic Technique Series

4 sessions | Marco Posadas ([email protected])

Language: English and Spanish

This series of seminars is centered in the psychoanalyst technique when working with racialized, queer, and queer and racialized patients who have survived trauma. We will navigate classical concepts that are the foundation of psychoanalysis as a craft and a method. Each session will focus in one concept, some of the classic technical concepts are:

1. Conflict between free association vs. evenly hovering attention
2. neutrality,
3. the rule of abstinence,
4. transference and countertransference dynamics,
5. the Oedipal complex,
6. dream work,
7. the Phallus and penis envy,
8. Interpretation and the use of silence
9. Transference neurosis and the analytic cure.

In the first session we will start from the concept of the psychoanalytic frame (Bleger, 1967) to set the stage for the analytic situation to unfold, followed by free association and evenly hovering attention in the second session. Session #1 Seminar title: Introduction and the psychoanalytic frame. The role of resistance as a point of reference that defines psychoanalytic theories and the specify of analytic listening: to preserve life The psychoanalytic frame Session #2 Seminar title: Free association and evenly hovering attention References: Bleger, J. (1967). Psycho-Analysis of the psycho-analytic frame. International Journals of Psychoanalysis, 48, 511–519. Cassorla, R.M. (2005). From bastion to enactment. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 86(3):699-719

Schedule:

• March 22, 2026 (English)
• March 29, 2026 (English)
• April 19, 2026 (Spanish)
• April 26, 2026 (Spanish)

Trans Phantasms of the Cis Imaginary

2 sessions | Griffin Hansbury ([email protected])

What happens to the trans body and person in the cisgender imaginary? This course explores how cis responds to, is haunted by, and defends against the presence of transness. Rather than approaching trans subjectivity as an identity to be understood or explained, we will investigate how transness is taken into the cis imaginary as a phantasmatic object—an object of fear, excitation, denial, desire. How does the figure of the trans person function as a structural disturbance to the coherence of the cis self? What defenses—disavowal, projection, foreclosure, fetishization—are mobilized in response? And how does the cis imaginary respond differently when faced with transmasculinity or transfemininity? Drawing from contemporary trans and queer thought, this course explores the unconscious formations that shape cultural, political, and interpersonal responses to transness. We will look for and through texts as sites where transness appears not as itself, but as a symptom, a threat, a wish, or an impossibility within cis fantasy. This course takes the proposition that trans figures are not simply marginalized or erased, but obsessively imagined, distorted, or (in the largely unexplored case of transmasculinity) refused symbolization in the service of cis stability.

Schedule:

• May 3, 2026
• May 10, 2026

Making Room for Multiplicity: Therapy with Mixt Couples

3 sessions | Mary Kim Brewster ([email protected])

This course will provide the beginning and experienced therapist with a theoretical foundation and practical guidelines for conducting therapy with couples in which one or both members identify as Asian, Black, Brown, Mixt, multiracial, multiethnic, or mixt. Throughout this course we will consider how categorical models of monoracial relationships operate to maintain hegemonic and normative ideals that place psychic tension on the individual and specific familial and societal pressures on the couple. Special attention will be dedicated to how individual experiences of racialization, marginalization, immigration, and assimilation, as well as intergenerational familial histories of colonization, enslavement, and war, inform the emotional positions and dynamic interactions of the couple. Participants will be introduced to an integrated systemic-relational/psychodynamic approach to couple therapy that is aimed toward helping members of a multiracial couple move from misapprehension to a greater understanding of the other. Classes will focus on systemic-relational theory, a reconfiguration of interventions used in couple therapy to address the specificities of the mixt couple, and case discussions. Participants are encouraged to bring both case and autobiographical material for discussion with the larger group.

Schedule:

• May 17, 2026
• May 24, 2026
• May 31, 2026