Events

Event details

On 25th of September Petros Patounas, psychoanalyst of the School of the Freudian Letter, will present a seminar entitled 'How do we practise Freudian analysis with Transgender individuals?'. 

In recent times there has been a buzz within psychoanalytic circles and schools around the world regarding the 'trans' question. Freudian schools, and not only, have attempted to approach this phenomenon in various ways in order to facilitate discussions, meanings, and interpretations. However, a number of analysts have been magnetised by and drawn into this discourse. Therefore, in paying attention to what is being written about it and the ways that this topic is being approached, one can detect heavy traces of influence of the discourses of trans activists.

According to Patounas, although these are important questions and discourses to be considered, it appears that psychoanalysts have forgotten their main function: that of creating space for the analysand’s subjective truth and Act. He claims that a number of psychoanalysts are captured by the discourses of trans activism and are responding to these challenging issues from an identification with the signifier “psychoanalyst”, taking a position conforming to the activists’ demands.

This has little to do with the analyst as responding to the subject in speaking about their most profound questions of being. Very few have taken this question to heart, which is the core point of the Freudian orientation: how do we practise with transgender individuals? This question is not a matter of technique but one of desire, the analyst’s desire.

In this seminar, Petros Patounas responds from his experience with transgender people to vital questions regarding the analytic act.

Further information

Fees: GBP 10

Language: English

Date and time: 25.09.2021, from 6:30pm - 8pm

The interview will be delivered online via Zoom application. You can book your ticket via Eventbrite here. 

After booking a ticket you will receive an email from Eventbrite with the link to the event. Please note to access the event you will have to register with Eventbrite and be logged in with your account. 

Contact: Nadia Molodkina, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Event details

On 4th of September 2021 Petros Patounas, psychoanalyst of the School of the Freudian Letter, will present a seminar entitled 'The analysis of a Transgender Woman: the Voice of the father regained'. 

Patounas will analyse briefly the testimony of a Transgender woman, with the difficulties in this person’s life, prostitution, rape and finally the return to her body, a body where the voice was not able to possess at that stage, but instead it was possessing.

What can we say about the Trans debates, phenomena or experiences having in mind the structures, the master signifiers, the fundamental fantasy, the object a, the demand of the Other, and love?

Certainly about love. The question of love for Patounas is not a question because it is always there, love is always there: what the question is for Patounas, is “how a child is loved in the structures around it”, structures that cannot be separated from the fantasies of those around the child and how they interrelate with one another.

Further information

Fees: GBP 10

Language: English

Date and time: 04.09.2021, from 6:30pm - 8pm

This event is for SFL members and/or by invitation only. The seminar will be delivered online via Zoom application. 

Contact: Nadia Molodkina, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Event details

SFL UK presents the second part of the event under the title ‘Polemics around the question of gender: Adam and Eve do not exist’. Spyros Zenios, psychologist and researcher, will be conducting a second interview with Petros Patounas, psychoanalyst of the School of the Freudian Letter, on his concerns regarding the polemics around the question of gender.

The second part of the series aims at examining in detail the manual of the APA in approaching people, adults and children, in relation to gender dysphoria.

Patounas’ thesis regarding the main psychological approaches to gender dysphoria is that they are reducing the listener/psychologist into a simpleton without a voice; without a voice that could express something beyond their own opinion or a manualised dogma; a voice that can invite the subject to elaborate and examine their experience, bringing questions that allow them to clarify their desire at the core of their sense of being. This was one of the main ways Freud indicated for approaching the analysand’s structure. Patounas advocates that each remarkable articulation deriving from children, eg., their ideas of being a boy or girl in relation to the other sex, need to be examined within its contexts, conscious and unconscious, if psychologists want the best for those people that they are aiming to assist. It is here that psychoanalysis in the Lacanian orientation can facilitate the utmost appreciation of this discontent, which has exposed key blind spots of the Americanised way of approaching the human subject and its discourse.

Further information

Fees: GBP 10

Language: English

Date and time: 24.07.2021, from 6:30pm - 8pm

The interview will be delivered online via Zoom application. You can book your ticket via Eventbrite here. 

After booking a ticket you will receive an email from Eventbrite with the link to the event. Please note to access the event you will have to register with Eventbrite and be logged in with your account. 

Contact: Nadia Molodkina, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Event details

Spyros Zenios, psychologist and researcher, will be interviewing Petros Patounas, psychoanalyst of the School of the Freudian Letter, on his concerns regarding the polemics around the question of gender. Patounas’ position is that, 

“Current discourse around gender and gender dysphoria exposes structural faults in the reasoning of American psychiatry and psychology; their sole focus on the symptoms is an effect of their foreclosure of the symptom's context". He continues that, "People presenting with transgender challenges do not have access to the best quality support. Instead, thousands of priest-like individuals trained in supposed sciences can apparently offer cures without exploring the enigmas of what appears as truth in the place of the desire of the subject.  

Desire has no place in the modern “Ψ” professions because its presence eliminates the ‘specialist’. Moreover, medicalisation of human suffering responds to the enigma of what is being said with medical products and services. It is when desire and what constitutes its space are invaded and annihilated that one encounters the dysphorias and the syndromes."

Further information

Fees: GBP 10

Language: English

Date and time: 19.06.2021, from 6:30pm - 8pm

The interview will be delivered online via Zoom application. You can book your ticket via Eventbrite here. 

After booking a ticket you will receive an email from Eventbrite with the link to the event. Please note to access the event you will have to register with Eventbrite and be logged in with your account. 

Contact: Nadia Molodkina, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.