“Wayfinding in the underland of gender.”
With Guest Speaker: Dr. Oren Gozlan
Art credits: “Untitled” by Wallace Keck | photograph
This presentation draws upon Robert MacFarlane’s (2021) notion of storytelling as the human’s mechanism for “wayfinding” and his concept of “deep time” to consider our stake in orienting ourselves within non-normative gender formations. My purpose is to propose gender as a new learning landscape. The new scene involves stories from cisgender, trans, non-binary subjects or subjects who claim to have no gender at all. At the same time that we cannot be sure how to navigate its new terrain, we may be prone to resist the pain of psychic change. How do we navigate a landscape we could not have anticipated? The paper presents snippets of four new accounts of transitioning which permit an opening of the concept and the experience of gender as mutability. I argue that working with situations that topple conventional theories of gender require us to begin to wonder about our own relationship to psychic change.
Dr. Oren Gozlan is a Registered Clinical Psychologist with the College of Psychologists of Ontario (CPO) and psychoanalyst who works with adults. He is a graduate of the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis (TIP), the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TICP) as well as the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis’ ‘New Directions in Psychoanalysis’ program. He is currently the Director of Clinical Training at the Adler Graduate School Inc., where he teaches. He is also faculty at the Toronto Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TICP) and an instructor at the Canadian Institute for Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (CICAPP). He has published on topics such as gender, transgender issues, and trauma and presented at various conferences and workshops. He has 19 journal publications as well as a book and an edited volume:
- Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian Approach (Routledge, 2015)•
- Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies: In Transition (Routledge, 2018)
Learning Objectives: At the end of this program/session/event participants will be able to:
- Consider new ways of inquiry into gender;
- Identify obstacles to navigating new gender formations;
- Discuss notions of gender beyond identitarian discourses and appreciate the ways in which such a shift may orient practice.
Registration is closed.
Please email info@wbcps.org for late registrations.
