Seatavern

This conference is designed to open our minds and our practices in working with gender, sexuality, and sex in our consulting rooms.

Drawing on a range of clinical scenarios with individuals, couples, and families presenting with concerns relating to gender, sexuality, and sex, this conference will consider the issues and challenges that therapists face in this area of practice.

There will, for example, be opportunities to think about the tensions inherent in working psychoanalytically with couples experiencing sexual difficulties and decisions regarding a referral for specific psychosexual therapy. How do we think about this split, and what impact might it have on the therapist, the couple, and the therapeutic endeavour?

Consideration will also be given to developments in thinking and practice regarding ethical non-monogamy and open and polyamorous relationships, as a counterpoint to the more familiar monogamous couple relationship and the incidence of affairs in our work. Particular attention will be paid to countertransference responses when confronted with difference and what, as therapists we feel able to tolerate and manage in our practice.

With the increasing presence of those identifying as trans, queer, non-binary, pansexual, it seems imperative that we, as therapists, examine the implications of gender non-conforming individuals on couple and family relationships and on us as therapists. How, as psychoanalytic practitioners, are we managing the call for affirmative practice and the push for greater transparency in our work?

This conference promises to develop and enhance our ethical acumen as clinicians working therapeutically with gender, sexuality, and sex.

Damian McCann (D.Sys.Psych) is a psychoanalytic couple psychotherapist working as a visiting clinician at Tavistock Relationships, London; adjunct faculty member of the International Psychotherapy Institute (IPI), Washington, DC; an associate of Queen Anne Street Practice, London; and an editorial board member of Couple & Family Psychoanalysis. He is also a consultant systemic psychotherapist with many years of experience working with children, adolescents, and their families. He has a particular interest in working with gender and sexual diversity in psychoanalytic practice and has published and taught widely on this topic. His doctoral research was concerned with understanding the meaning and impact of violence in the couple relationships of gay men, and he is involved in developing approaches to working with couples more generally in which there is violence and abuse. He is the editor of ‘Same-Sex Couples and Other Identities: Psychoanalytic Perspectives’ published by Routledge in 2021, and co-editor of “Couples as Parents: Explorations in Couple Psychotherapy’ also published by Routledge in 2024.