The Seasoned Clinician’s Notebook

The educational series, “The Seasoned Clinician’s Notebook: How Psychoanalytic Concepts Inform the Practice of Psychotherapy,” features clinicians from a range of disciplines who share how they use concepts from psychoanalysis to enrich their clinical work, from cultivating creativity to working with addictions.

These PCC sessions take place on Zoom. They are free of charge, but reservations are required.

CEUs will not be offered for The Seasoned Clinician’s Notebook, but Letters of Attendance will be sent upon completion of a program evaluation survey.

Get the details and register for The Seasoned Clinician’s Notebook!

Gender Polymorphism: Another Royal Road to the Unconscious

Presented by Marco Posadas, PhD, MSW, RSW, FIPA

May 18, 2024

10 am to 12 pm ET
via Zoom

Dreams occupy a privileged position in psychoanalysis as the royal road to the Unconscious par excellence. Psychoanalytic mental health clinicians tend to withhold their judgment and ask for the client’s associations with the hope of moving from the manifest content of the dream to the latent content. Thinking of sexual difference and gender polymorphism as a natural aspect of human existence opens the door to listening to gender identities and gender expression as a legitimate area for psychoanalytic work. In this presentation, Dr. Posadas proposes that we listen to gender polymorphism in our clients in a manner similar to how we listen to dreams in the analytic situation. Positioning gender expression, gender identity, and the gendered experiences of the client as a waking dream during the session, we can work with the latent content imbedded in the lived embodied experience of each client. When working with gender in this proposed way, the clinician needs to be aware of the tensions that socially constructed prejudices against gender diversity such as homotransphobia, cisgenderism, anti-indigenous and anti-black racisms, and white supremacy have in their work with LGBTQI+ and racialized communities. These tensions can be experienced and observed in the transference and countertransference dynamics and, when managed skillfully, can strengthen the therapeutic alliance and help prevent iatrogenic enactments with these communities.

Marco Posadas, PhD, MSW, RSW, FIPA, is Chief Clinical Officer of The House of Purpose, a consulting firm that develops psychoanalytically informed programs and interventions to support organizations’ mental and emotional health. He is a psychoanalyst member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), Clinical Social Worker, Licensed Psychologist (MEX), and earned his PhD at Smith College School for Social Work in Northampton, Massachusetts. He currently operates a clinical practice in Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis, Clinical Supervision and Consultation in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Posadas trained at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (TPS&I) and is a member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, the Mexican Psychoanalytic Association, and the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA).

He is the inaugural Chair of the Gender and Sexual Diversity Studies Committee of the IPA, where he developed the IPA’s sexual and gender strategic plan that included scientific events in Europe, North American and Latin America, and the creation of the first IPA Tiresias award. He is faculty at several psychoanalytic institutes across North America and Latin America where he works to integrate cultural, gender and sexual diversity, and anti-oppressive practice into psychoanalytic clinical practice.

His research is in prejudices impacting the clinician when working psychoanalytically with LGBTQ+ and racialised peoples and other marginalized communities who have survived trauma. He has worked in the HIV sector for over 27 years. Dr. Posadas served on the Board of Directors of the Ontario Association of SocialWorkers (OASW) where he was recipient of the 2013 OASW Inspirational Leader Award for his work with underserved and marginalized populations, and was distinguished with the Social Worker of the year for Toronto award in 2022.

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