Saturday Dialogue with Brian Garrison & Sue Carlson

Gender is at the core of all relational life. Situated at the junction between mind and body, individual and culture, self and other, this deeply unconscious and creative process of becoming is rife with contradictions, vulnerabilities, and profound artistry. Placing the work of Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion in conversation with Jean Laplanche and Avgi Saketopoulou, this dialogue will explore the clinical demands on the therapist to navigate the nuances of patience and recognition: how to preside over a process of gendered self-experimentation that both holds the cultural/political/historical forces in mind as the context and raw materials of gendering, while simultaneously refusing their pressure to impose a premature and procrustean failure. If, as Laplanchean theory demonstrates, gender is a response to the sexual unconscious of the Other, then how is the therapist's own sexual unconscious involved, for better or for worse, in the navigation of gender in the clinical setting? This is not merely a matter of how to speak to gender, but of how to see it, of how to let it change you.