Presentation: WBCP students and candidates will meet with the presenters to discuss the workshop and clinical material. This discussion seeks to explore a range of engagements with gender in the psychoanalytic encounter. One portion of the workshop will explore how contemporary anti-trans legislation and cultural narratives of monstrosity distort the analytic space for trans and gender expansive patients, threatening their capacity for playful work, while highlighting how trans survival and creativity might persist in the face of annihilating projections. The other portion turns to aliveness: how loosening gender constraints in the consulting room allows for the exploration and re-avowal of certain, gendered parts and ultimately can lead to a unique, profound experience of feeling alive. Together, these presentations underscore psychoanalysis as both refuge and crucible—where both monstrousness and aliveness might meet.

Presenter: Sien Rivera, MD, is Assistant Program Director of the Prisma Health Midlands/University of South Carolina General Psychiatry residency program, and Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in Columbia, SC. They received their medical degree from SUNY Stony Brook School of Medicine and completed their general psychiatry residency and child adolescent psychiatry fellowship at Prisma Health Midlands/University of South Carolina. They are a former fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association and a winner of the Ralph Roughton Paper Award. They are the former co-chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Committee on Gender and Sexuality and they present nationally and internationally on topics related to gender, sexuality, and new technologies.Presenter: Justin Shubert, PsyD, PhD is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst working in private practice in Los Angeles, where he is the founder and director of a psychodynamic private practice group called Silver Lake Psychotherapy. He is the former chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Committee on Gender and Sexuality, the past Diversity Editor of The American Psychoanalyst, a founding member of the Committee for Diversities and Sociocultural Issues at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, and has been a faculty member at the Los Angeles Institute of Psychoanalytic Studies, The Wright Institute of Los Angeles, and the New Center for Psychoanalysis. He is endlessly fascinated by the mystery and wonder contained in gender & sexuality.