SCIENTIFIC MEETING – Re-reading Jean Laplanche: For a Queer Gender Metapsychology

Presenter: Nicolas Evzonas, PhD

Saturday, October 23, 2021: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

TPS Scientific Meeting: Open to All

** Preregistration is required ** DISTANCE PARTICIPATION ONLY ** – This course will be conducted online. Email psychoanalyst@bellnet.ca to rsvp. Registration deadline is one week prior to the meeting.

My presentation focuses on the gender paradigm as conceptualized by Jean Laplanche. This approach is enriched by the contributions of feminist studies, queer theory, and contemporary American psychoanalysts. The plurality of gender expressions, seen as a challenge to contemporary clinical work, is understood as the consequence of complex interactions between the following: the enigmatic messages primarily implanted into the child’s body ego by a constellation of libidinally invested and socially inserted adults; the perceptual genital difference between the sexes; the multitude of gender prescriptions vertically and horizontally received by the subject throughout the course of their life; the translation of these experiences in accordance with one’s idiosyncratic urges; and their endless retranslation under the sway of afterwardness with the support of socially and culturally determined hermeneutic grids. The epistemological proposal situated in this kaleidoscopic framework is that of a primary queer sexuality, secondarily transformed into a less inclusive psychic bisexuality through the introjection of the culturally prevalent gender binary. Hierarchical relations in the social field are further viewed as enigmatic messages “to be translated,” inculcated into the child’s psyche by adult bearers of powerful norms. By means of this intergenerational transmission, gender, sexual, class, and race ideals are liable to perpetuate and thus consolidate the “normative unconscious” formed by the identifications refused because of their social non-conformity.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this presentation participants will be able to:

1. Become familiarized with the work of Jean Laplanche, one of Europe’s most ground-breaking psychoanalytic thinkers, only partly translated into English.
2. Be aware that metapsychology open to sexual and gender diversity has a simultaneously clinical, epistemological, and political scope.
3. Appreciate an intersectional and overinclusive approach toward the emergence of human subjectivity.

Nicolas Evzonas, PhD

Nicolas Evzonas, PhD, is a Greek Cypriot Paris-based therapist in private practice. He is a candidate in the French Psychoanalytic Association (APF) and Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychology at the University of Paris. He has published numerous papers in several languages on clinical and applied psychoanalysis, as well as essays on films, theater, and literature. He is the author of a forthcoming French book on gender countertransference, the co-editor of a special issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry on “Sexualities, Gender, Class, and Race: A Psychoanalytic View from France”, and the editor of a forthcoming double special issue of The Psychoanalytic Review on “Trans* Subjectivities and Countertransference”.