Overview

Gender: A Contemporary Introduction offers a sophisticated exploration of gender through a psychoanalytic lens, moving beyond binary frameworks to present gender as a fluid, kaleidoscopic state of mind shaped by cultural narratives, unconscious fantasies, and libidinal attachments. Oren Gozlan presents a critical re-examination of psychoanalytic theories of gender and its relation to sexuality, examining how and why we are invested in it through a comprehensive psychoanalytic approach. The volume provides novel conceptualizations of gender and transitioning, offering original metaphors for new ways of listening to gender in clinical practice. Each chapter considers multiple vantage points including social, cultural, therapeutic, experiential, and theoretical perspectives on gender, exploring the interplay between cultural, political, and conceptual shifts. The book places in tension the concept of gender as a social identity, subject position, emotional situation, and state of mind, engaging the contradictions between these differing viewpoints. By redefining gender as a psychoanalytic object that can only be approached indirectly through fantasy, relation, and the unconscious, Gozlan provides clinicians with fresh conceptual tools to navigate these complex territories. This book is an ideal guide for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and social workers seeking enhanced clinical understanding of gender diversity. It is also an essential resource for training institutes and graduate programmes in psychology, gender studies, and related fields.

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9781041093244

Table of Contents

Reviews

‘In this essential book, Oren Gozlan tackles the notion of gender from a perspective that is crucial to understanding its effects on subjective construction. His sharp reflections go beyond the simplifications and stereotypes of binary categories, approaching a complex point of view that transcends paralyzing certainties and comfortable prevailing knowledge. He focuses on being able to inhabit uncertainties and contradictions, including what remains unspeakable, uncanny, in clinical practice, teaching, and reading/writing. His proposals illuminate the polyphonic condition of gender, not as identity but in situation and in becoming, symbolically intertwined with an aesthetic and an ethic of waiting and learning from experience.’ Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Former Chair of IPA 'Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee', Former President of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association ‘Oren Gozlan’s Gender: A Contemporary Introduction offers a postmodern perspective on efforts to try and make sense of gender. In doing so, its approach is more complex than currently ubiquitous political efforts to reducegender’s meaning(s) to genital appearance and chromosomes. Here, instead, the reader is invited to enter a world populated by psychoanalysts, feminists and queer theorists, a world where gender can be hypothesized but never known in an absolute way. In this regard, this volume is a creative psychoanalyst’s invitation to forestall premature attribution of meaning(s) to genderwhile confronting one’s own anxiety of uncertainty about the subject.’ Jack Drescher, MD, Training & Supervising Analyst, William Alanson White Institute, Recipient, 2022 Mary S. Sigourney Award for International Work on Gender & Sexuality

Author Information

Oren Gozlan is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst based in Ontario, Canada. He is the author of Gender with Sexuality: Situations of Psychoanalytic Learning (2025) and Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian Approach (2014), and the editor of Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies: In Transition (2018).

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