Working Psychoanalytically with Gender Diversity and Sexualities: Resistances to Differences
Part of IPA - Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies series - more in this series

Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : October 2025
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 170
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 98260
- ISBN 13 : 9781032871868
- ISBN 10 : 1032871865
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Working Psychoanalytically with Gender Diversity and Sexualities considers and challenges expectations about psychoanalytic work with LGBTQIA+ patients.
The book is organised into three parts, starting with a theoretical review, which includes discussion of the relevance of the Oedipus complex, resistance to infantile sexuality, the conquest of otherness and challenges in maintaining neutrality. Secondly, the contributors approach an ethical dimension, with chapters describing different moments in the way in which psychoanalysts engage with ethical responsibility in the face of gender and sexual diversity. The third part of the book considers an ontological dimension, that incorporates fluidity as a condition of the subject as an object of study and includes factors such as race and generational status, emergence of stigmas and a particular focus on the concept of helplessness. The contributors offer insight into countertransferential reactions and responses in clinical work, ensuring that analysts can work with these patients without preconceptions standing in the way.
Extending an opportunity to air conflicting psychoanalytic views and rethink established psychoanalytic concepts, this book will be key reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training. It will also be of interest to academics and students of psychoanalytic studies and gender studies.
Reviews and Endorsements
At a time when free thinking and a democratically legitimate, diverse culture are increasingly under threat worldwide, this book provides a scientifically sound wake-up call to preserve open thinking not only in our culture and society, but also within our psychoanalytic community. With their consistent plea for an opening and fluidity of psychoanalytic theory and practice in the realm of sexuality and gender, the authors repeatedly touch on the original field of psychoanalysis. At the same time, their multi-layered message is: we need resistance to arbitrariness in our psychoanalytic concepts, but also resistance to normative restriction in the diversity of innovative theories on socially new, often still incomprehended forms of sexuality and gender. This is an excellent book that cannot be pigeonholed into any psychoanalytic cliché, but opens up creative spaces for thought and life.
Dr. med. Heribert Blass, IPA President elect
The paradox at the heart of psychoanalysis--without resistance, there can be no cure; yet when resistance calcifies, the analytic process stalls--shapes every treatment, implicating both analyst and analysand. With candor and precision, the ten essays in this volume—authored by a distinguished group of international clinicians—trace the evolving contours of resistance as it intersects with gender, embodiment, and the enduring question of sexual difference. It is, unmistakably, essential reading for the contemporary psychoanalyst.
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D. psychoanalyst, Sigourney Award winner, and author of Transgender Psychoanalysis.
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Series editor preface
Introduction
Marco Posadas, Silvia Acosta and Frances Thomson-Salo
Part 1. Gender diversity and sexuality: theoretical revisions that include diversity
Introduction
Angela Vila-Real
1. The Oedipus complex: an expanded approach on sexual and gender polyphonies
Leticia Glocer Fiorini
2. Psychosexuality and the problem of (mis)representation: A mentalizing perspective
Liz Allison
3. Encountering otherness: On the ability (and inability) for psychic movement within sexual states of mind
Anat Schumann
4. Shapes of gender identity: Three stories with an impact
Domenico di Ceglie
Part 2. Psychoanalytic ethics and depathologising gender diversities and sexualities: Intolerance as an unconscious response to violence in the analytic field
Introduction
Marco Posadas
5. The many colours of the rainbow: Depathologising sexual diversity
Sergio Lewkowicz
6. Towards a psychoanalytic ethics-based practice with transgender individuals
Alessandra Lemma
7. A history of reception: Falling apart as the ground for learning
Oren Gozlan
Part 3. In search of complexity
Introduction
Nicolas Evzonas
8. Gender fluid and fixed: gender and suffering, gender and transformation
Adrienne Harris
9. Gender crossing as caesura versus gender crossing as cut
Dana Amir
a) Eva Reichelt Discussion
b) Elda Abrevaya Discussion
10. On Trying to Pass off Transphobia as Psychoanalysis and Cruelty as “Clinical Logic”: Gender Dysphoria
Avgi Saketopoulou
About the Editor(s)
Frances Thomson Salo trained with the British Society as a child and adult psychoanalyst, is a Training analyst and past President of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society, Chair of the International Psychoanalytical Association Committee of Women in Psychoanalysis, an editorial board member of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, a consultant infant mental health clinician at the Royal Women's Hospital and child psychotherapist at the Royal Children's Hospital, an Honorary Fellow of the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, an Associate Professor on the faculty of the University of Melbourne Graduate Diploma for Infant and Parent Mental Health, and has published on child and infant-parent psychotherapy.
More titles by Frances Thomson-Salo
Marco Posadas, RSW, MSW, PhD, is a psychoanalyst based in Toronto, and inaugural chair of the IPA Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee. He received the 2018 Sue Fairbanks Excellence in Psychoanalytic Knowledge Distinguished Lecturer award, the 2022 Distinguished Social Worker for Toronto award, and is the 2024-2025 Antoinette Calabria visiting scholar for the Psychoanalytic Center of the Carolinas.
Silvia R. Acosta, PhD, is a psychoanalyst at the Asociación Psicoanalítica de Cordoba, Argentina, and member of the Sociedade Portuguesa de Psicanálise, Lisbon. She is a founding member of the IPA Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee. She has published papers on clinical psychoanalysis, sexual diversity and gender violence. Currently, she is the Scientific Secretary of the Annual Book of Psychoanalysis in Spanish.
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