Patricia Gherovici, PhD
Psychoanalysis and Subjectivities in Transit
May 9-10, 2026
Kinzie Hotel
20 West Kinzie Street, Chicago
& ZOOM
Patricia Gherovici, PhD, is a psychoanalyst, analytic supervisor, and Sigourney Award recipient. Single-authored books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Gradiva Award and Boyer Prize), Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference . With Chris Christian: Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious (Gradiva Award and American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize); with Manya Steinkoler: Lacan On Madness: Madness Yes You Can't ; Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy, and Psychoanalysis, Gender and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans* (Gradiva Award).
Seminar Title: Psychoanalysis and Subjectivities in Transit
Seminar Description: It is from a psychoanalytic perspective that this seminar will explore the logic of identification common in the United States—a country defined by social pressure to declare one’s identity. We can begin by assuming that nobody fully knows who one is. Claims of identity, which often collide with subjective experience, must be examined critically. If identity offers meaning and a sense of self, it can also diminish one’s singularity, which generates a struggle for those whose gender expressions like clothes, body language, speech patterns, social interactions, etc., do not align with social expectations traditionally associated with the sex they were assigned at birth or for those whose bodies are racialized.
This seminar is based on the critique of psychoanalysis and sexual difference that the instructor developed through their psychoanalytic practice in Philadelphia’s barrio where they encountered populations marginalized by race.
Recommended Readings
Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Chapter VII)
Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Lacan Mirror Stage.pdf
Jack Halberstam, Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (a selection) (electronic version available)
Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, and So Much More (New York: Atria Books, 2014) (A selection; electronic version available)
Gherovici & Manya Steinkoler, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans*, Routledge, 2023. (electronic version available)
Andrea Long Chu, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy, and It Shouldn’t Have To.”
The New York Times, 24 November 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/vaginoplasty-transgender-medicine.html
Sinan Richards, “A lesson for the world: Solange Faladé’s anti-colonialmultiracialism”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09639489.2023.2264217
Paul B. Preciado, Can the monster speak? : A report to an academy of psychoanalysts (A selection; electronic version available)
Gherovici, “The monsters within and the monsters without: Gender dissidents and the future of psychoanalysis” Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Vol. 20, Issue, 1, 2023, 65-8 (pdf available)