Patricia Gherovici, in-person, offers a seminar which draws from her extensive clinical work and research on transgenderism and psychoanalysis. Starting from some clinical examples of trans identified analysands, Patricia will explore the idea of the trans experience as a wish to be reborn. Her title alludes to a phrase in Carl Jung’s famous 1935 lecture that brought Samuel Beckett back to the writing of Murphy. This lecture takes inspiration from a clinical meditation about the suicidal tendencies of analysands lost in “gender disorders” who “find themselves” in a trans identity as a creative making-new. She explores what can lead from death to life, which would make us consider death more as a life force, a force that allows for a re-birth. Clinical work opens a path towards figuring out how to live with the death drive, which, paradoxically renders life possible. Here death emerges not as the opposite of life but rather as a condition for life.

Patricia Gherovici is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. She is co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group and Associate Faculty, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania (PSYS), an Honorary member at IPTAR, New York, a Founding Member of Das Unbehagen and co-founder and trustee of the board of Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, New York. Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press: 2003; Gradiva Award and the Boyer Prize), Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge: 2010) and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge: 2017). She has published three edited volumes (with Manya Steinkoler): Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Lacan On Madness: Madness, Yes You Can't ( Routledge: 2015) and Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (Cambridge University Press: 2016), and a collection (with Chris Christian), Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious (Routledge: 2019). Her recent book (with Manya Steinkoler) Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans (Routledge: 2023) has been nominated as a finalist for the Gradiva Award.