Fridays @ CCP Lecture Series
Jill Gentile, PhD
(New York, NY)
The Gender of Object Use: What the Phallus Cannot Hold
Friday December 11, 2026
7-9pm (CST)
ZOOM ONLY
About the presentation: Must the object become phallic to become real? Winnicott's ostensibly ungendered theory of object use may conceal a sexual politics of subjectivation: the maternal object, initially useful as an abject receptacle for what the emerging subject cannot bear, becomes recognizable as a subject only upon surviving destruction and acquiring phallic standing. But what must be repudiated for the object to stand? And what if the feminine is not merely what escapes phallic signification, but what makes signification itself possible?
Reading Winnicott alongside Lacan, Kristeva, and Irigaray, this paper interrogates the phallic economy of object use. Lacan's feminine not-all disrupts phallic totalization, while feminine jouissance intimates an enjoyment beyond its measure. Yet insofar as the feminine remains designated through its excess over phallic logic, does it acquire symbolic agency—or remain captive to the very economy it exceeds?
I propose the vaginal signifier as an intervention into this predicament: neither a rival master signifier nor a recuperation of feminine plenitude, but a symbolic form of generative space, a boundary that opens, a limit that enables passage. The maternal object's enigmatic desire already introduces alterity within the supposedly pre-Oedipal dyad, unsettling the paternal monopoly on law and difference. Feminine law does not displace paternal prohibition; it makes non-possession something other than exile.
The surviving object need not renounce permeability to acquire standing. Beyond abjection and phallic mastery emerges the heart-object, whose capacity to stand and open transforms the meaning of object use. Love becomes possible not through the overcoming of lack or difference, but through sustaining a relation to what exceeds possession, knowledge, and symbolic capture.
Jill Gentile,PhD, Jill Gentile, PhD, is a psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, writer, and faculty member at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She serves as 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 explorations extend to master plant dietas in the Peruvian Amazon and shamanic and spiritual traditions of healing. Alongside her New York City analytic practice, she leads study groups exploring the evolving possibilities of psychoanalysis in dialogue with expanded states of consciousness, spiritual agency, and collective transformation.
Learning Objectives
Participants will be able to articulate a developmental movement from use of the abject to use of the phallic object as a newly theorized dimension of object use.
Participants will be able to explain how a gendered reinterpretation of Winnicott's theory of object use opens a developmental pathway beyond gender polarity toward mutual recognition, democratic relatedness, and love.
This is an Intermediate Level Presentation
Fees
CCP members: free with annual $195 membership, payable at registration.
Students:free with annual $175 membership, payable at registration.
New Fellows / Ongoing: free with annual $250/$300 membership, payable at registration.
Non-CCP members, single admission: $50
Continuing Education
This program is sponsored for Continuing Education Credits by the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. There is no commercial support for this program, nor are there any relationships between the continuing education sponsor, presenting organization, presenter, program content, research, grants or other funding that could be construed as conflicts of interest. Participants are asked to be aware of the need for privacy and confidentiality throughout the program. If the program content becomes stressful, participants are encouraged to process these feelings during discussion periods. The Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis maintains responsibility for this program and its content. CCP is licensed by the state of Illinois to sponsor continuing education credits for Licensed Clinical Social Workers, Licensed Social Workers, Licensed Clinical Professional Counselors, Licensed Professional Counselors, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapy Counselors and Licensed Clinical Psychologists (license no. 159.000941 and 268.000020 and 168.000238 Illinois Dept. of Financial and Professional Regulation).
Professionals holding the aforementioned credentials will receive 2.0 continuing education credits for attending the entire program. To receive these credits a completed evaluation form must be turned in at the end of the presentation and licensed psychologists must first complete a brief exam on the subject matter. No continuing education credit will be given for attending part of the presentation. Refunds for CE credit after the program begins will not be honored. If a participant has special needs or concerns about the program, s/he/they should contact Toula Kourliouros Kalven by September 17, 2026 at: tkalven@ccpsa.org
References/Suggested Readings
Gentile, J. (2022). The missing signifier and a malfunctioning paternal law: On the feminine third as vital portal for sexual difference and emancipatory democracy. In A. Govrin & T. Caspi (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (pp. 494–506). Routledge.
Gentile, J. (2023). The democratic significance of anatomical difference. In J. Petrucelli, S. Schoen, & N. Snider (Eds.), Patriarchy and its discontents (pp. 110–131). Routledge.
Kristeva. J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
Seligman, S. (2006) The Analyst's Theoretical Persuasion and the Construction of a Conscientious Analysis: Commentary on Paper by Meira Likierman. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 16:397-405
Winnicott, D. W. (1969). The use of an object. International Journal of Psycho- Analysis, 50: 711–716
Presented by
The Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis/CCP Program Committee