Jill Gentile, PhD
See Individual Titles Below
September 19-20, 2026
1132 S. Wabash Ave., Suite 502, Chicago
& ZOOM
***Please note starting time: 10am***
Jill Gentile, PhD, is a psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, writer, and faculty member at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality.
She is the author, with Michael Macrone, of Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire and more than fifty scholarly essays exploring agency, desire, democracy, free speech, and the feminine. Her work has received the Gradiva Award, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association Prize, and the Maurice Burke Paper Prize. She also served as an advisor to the acclaimed film The Tale.
Gentile has trained in ketamine-assisted therapy and psychedelic integration, and her broader studies encompass master plant dietas in the Peruvian Amazon and shamanic and spiritual approaches to healing. Alongside her analytic practice in New York City, she hosts study groups exploring how psychoanalysis might evolve in dialogue with emerging forms of consciousness, spirituality, and collective awakening.
Weekend Seminar
This seminar explores the evolution of personal, political, and ultimately spiritual agency—and the possibilities for expanded forms of consciousness. We begin with the aspirational promises of psychoanalysis and democracy, considering their shared commitments to freedom of expression: free association in the analytic setting and freedom of speech in the democratic sphere. From there, we take up the paradoxical role of hate and hate speech—not only as forces of psychic and political degradation and breakdown, but as entangled with desire, freedom, and the struggle toward more egalitarian forms of relation.
We then turn to feminine law and the exiled yet determinative feminine signifier, asking what becomes possible when psychoanalysis moves beyond an exclusive reliance on paternal laws of prohibition and lack. Finally, we consider recent eruptions of the previously “unthinkable”—pandemic, climate crisis, democratic and symbolic breakdown—as global psychoanalytic processes. Without minimizing their devastating and unequal tolls, might breakdown also expose the limits of inherited symbolic forms and become a portal to psychic, democratic, and spiritual transformation? Throughout, we will ask what the obscured but decisive action of the feminine might contribute to more relational, nondual, and heart-centered forms of collective life.
**A note on the reading: There is a substantial amount of reading assigned, so please begin well in advance of the seminar and do as much as you reasonably can, recognizing that some skimming may be necessary. As you read, please highlight passages or quotations that especially engage, provoke, puzzle, or challenge you, and note questions or associations you would like to bring into our discussion. I hope we can use the readings less as material to be “covered” than as a shared field for thinking together. Please come prepared, for each section of the seminar, to bring in at least one passage, question, or idea that you would especially like us to take up as a group.
Jill Gentile, PhD, is a psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, writer, and faculty member at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality.
She is the author, with Michael Macrone, of Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire and more than fifty scholarly essays exploring agency, desire, democracy, free speech, and the feminine. Her work has received the Gradiva Award, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association Prize, and the Maurice Burke Paper Prize. She also served as an advisor to the acclaimed film The Tale.
Gentile has trained in ketamine-assisted therapy and psychedelic integration, and her broader studies encompass master plant dietas in the Peruvian Amazon and shamanic and spiritual approaches to healing. Alongside her analytic practice in New York City, she hosts study groups exploring how psychoanalysis might evolve in dialogue with emerging forms of consciousness, spirituality, and collective awakening.
Saturday morning: Speaking Freely: Psychoanalysis, Democracy, and the Fundamental Rule
Readings:
Gentile, J. (2016). Democracy: Relevant to psychoanalysis. American Psychoanalyst, 50.
Gentile, J. (2016). What is special about speech? Psychoanalytic Psychology, 33, 73–88.
Gentile, J. (2001). Close but No Cigar: The perversion of agency and the absence of thirdness. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 37, 623-654.
Gentile, J. (2026) Hate Speech as the Action of Inequality: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Democracy and Social Power, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 46:6, 617-632, DOI:10.1080/07351690.2025.2489330
Saturday Afternoon: The Feminine Signifier
Readings:
Gentile, J. (2017, November 13). Trump, Freud, and the puzzle of femininity. Philosophical Salon. Retrieved from https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/trump-freud-and-the-puzzle-of-femininity/
Gentile, J. (2022). The missing signifier and a malfunctioning paternal law: On the feminine third as vital portal to sexual difference and emancipatory democracy. In A. Govrin & T. Caispi (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy. London/ New York: Routledge, pp. 495-507.
Gentile, J. (2023). On psychoanalysis’s invention of patriarchy and the democratic significance of anatomical difference. In J. Petrucelli, S. Schoen, & N. Snider (Eds.), Patriarchy and its discontents (pp. 110–131). Routledge.
Gentile, J. (2017) Tugging at the Umbilical Cord: Birtherism, Nativism,
and the Plotline of Trump's Delivery, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 53:4, 489-504, DOI: 10.1080/00107530.2017.1373543
Sunday morning: The Evolution of Spiritual Agency: Psychoanalysis, Psychedelics, and the Future of Consciousness
Readings:
Gentile, J. (2020). Time may change us: The strange temporalities, novel paradoxes, and democratic imaginaries of a pandemic. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 68:4, 649-669.
Gentile, J. (2026) Threshold of the Zero: Breakdown, Cosmic Intersubjectivity, and The Sacred Space Between (∆), Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 23:2, 203-215, DOI: 10.1080/1551806X.2026.2643116
*Gentile, J. with Macrone, M. (2016) Coda: homeland security and the secure home base. Chapter 18. In Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire. New York/ London: Karnac. Pp. 228-245. (*optional reading)