Overview

This book explores the changing attitudes and clinical responses to gender and transition in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. It examines gender as a dynamic and elusive psychic situation—lived through affect, fantasy, and symbolic pressures. Gozlan argues that gender shapes experience not only in patients’ lives but also in theory—where it unsettles coherence, challenges neutrality, and brings forward what is lost or unsymbolized. Engaging figures such as Sullivan, McDougall, Stoller, and Quinodoz, he reimagines the analyst as implicated in the transmission of gendered meanings, where the mind becomes a site of ethical and aesthetic reworking. This extends to the psychic life of psychoanalytic institutions, where gender’s fate and its impact on the analyst’s own transformation are examined. The book also interrogates the conditions under which the analyst’s thinking shifts—or resists shifting—and invites readers to rethink how gender circulates through psychoanalysis, theory, and institutional life. With a deep and nuanced understanding of gender in the clinic and beyond, this book is essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and other mental health professionals seeking to update their thinking and practice around gender and transitioning.

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9781032577357

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Reviews

'Oren Gozlan is a profoundly original and incisive psychoanalytic thinker whose work demonstrates an unparalleled ability to engage with the most complex and urgent questions of gender and sexuality. Drawing on a close reading of psychoanalytic theory, this brilliant book challenges traditional views, offering fresh conceptual tools for understanding gender in psychoanalysis, as well as a daring rethinking of gender not as identity but as a psychoanalytic event of becoming.' Prof. Dana Amir, Ph.D, Head, The Interdisciplinary Doctoral Track in Psychoanalysis, School of Therapy, University of Haifa, Clinical Psychologist, Supervising and Training Analyst, The Israel Psychoanalytic Society

Author Information

Oren Gozlan is a psychoanalyst in Toronto and a member of the Committee for Gender and Sexuality of the IPA. His Book, Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning (Routledge), won the American Academy & Board of Psychoanalysis’ annual book prize (2015).

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