Gay Men: Loss, Grief, and Mourning and the Reopening of Foreclosed Psychic Space ~ Apr 6, 2025

Featuring:

The recipient of the 2025 Ralph E. Roughton Paper Award American Psychoanalytic Association Committee on Gender and Sexuality
Robert Benedetti, PhD
and
Steven Kuchuck, DSW with discussion and reflections
and
Tripp Reed, MSW with case vignettes

Sunday, April 6, 2025

3 Diversity/LGTBQ CE Credits will be offered

REGISTER HERE!

Registration closes at noon ET on Friday, April 4th, 2025.

Nearly thirty years after the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, when there was not yet hope for a cure and when it was at its most grim, there remains an aging group of gay men who are confounded in their grief. When AIDS appeared, their sexual behavior was linked with illness and death further contributing to their sense of precarity and their experience of alienation. By 1995, AIDS was the single greatest killer of men in America ages 25-44 but with the introduction of protease inhibitors, survivors of this devastating period, including those who are HIV+, are often isolated and left to endure a complicated grieving process. Reinforcing the alienation associated with AIDS, there is paucity of psychoanalytic literature interrogating grieving experiences of individuals from stigmatized groups, such as gay men. In addition to the AIDS related focus on loss, this award winning paper brings in the concept of the apres-coup and how it can be applied to the historical situatedness of gay men. Since psychic space for gay men is often foreclosed, ways in which this may be addressed are discussed and implications for the analytic relationship are considered. Tripp Reed, LICSW will follow with a presentation of clinical material related to the paper and Steven Kuchuck, DSW will discuss both the paper and clinical material.

Learning Objectives:

At the conclusion of this conference, participants will be able to:

1. Describe why the current psychoanalytic literature fails to provide an adequate description of the unique grief experiences of individuals from a stigmatized group, such as gay men post AIDS.
2. Discuss the effect of the selfobject milieu on the mourning process of gay men.
3. Discuss ways in which the foreclosed psychic space of gay men might be reopened.
4. List examples of how and why aging gay men are confounded in their grief.

References:

Benedetti, R. (2015). Belonging: Ontogeny of a gay psychoanalytic candidate. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 10(4), 398-407. https://doi.org/10.1080/15551024.2015.1074002

Hansbury, G. (2017). The masculine vaginal: Working with queer men’s embodiment at the transgender edge. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 65(6), 1009-1031. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003065117742409

House, J. (2017). The ongoing rediscovery of apres-coup as a central Freudian concept. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 65(5), 773-798. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003065117738762

Saketopoulou, A. (2020). How the world becomes bigger; implantation, intromission, and the apres-coup: Discussion of House. In P. Sauvayre & D. Braucher (Eds.), The unconscious: Contemporary refractions in psychoanalysis (pp. 174-184). Routledge

Guzzardi, S. (2024). Toward a queered psychology of the self: Empathy and passibility from the margins to the center. Psychoanalysis, Self, and Context 19(1),33-48. https://doi.org/10.1080/24720038.2023.2251545

About our presenters:

Robert Benedetti, PhD is a licensed clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Washington, D.C. He received his certificate in contemporary psychoanalysis from the National Training Program in Contemporary Psychoanalysis (NTP) — National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP) in New York, New York. He has served as Co-Director of Curriculum and is a Training Committee member and Consulting Faculty member of the NTP. He is on the Executive Committee and is a Faculty Member and Supervisor in the Psychoanalytic Training program at the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (ICP+P) in Washington, D.C. He became Chair of psychoanalytic training at ICP+P in 2025. He recently published a Book Review of “The Unconscious: Contemporary Refractions in Psychoanalysis”, edited by Pascal Sauvayre and David Braucher. He has an article that will be published in Psychoanalytic Inquiry entitled, “My First Psychoanalytic Encounter: But, Almost 40 years After It, I Decided to Become A Psychoanalyst Anyway.” The paper upon which his presentation is based today: “Gay Men: Loss, Grief, and Mourning and the Reopening of Foreclosed Psychic Space” won the 2025 Ralph E. Roughton Award for best paper on Gender and Sexuality by the American Psychoanalytic Association.

---

Steven Kuchuck, DSW is former Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, where he currently serves as Senior Consulting Editor, Past President of IARPP, faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, NIP National Training Program, and other institutes. His book, The Relational Revolution in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, has been translated into numerous languages, and he won the Gradiva Awards for best book of 2015; Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience and 2016; The Legacy of Sandor Ferenczi: From Ghost to Ancestor (co-edited with Adrienne Harris). His most recent book, The Workbooks of Masud Khan: Diary of a Fallen Psychoanalyst (co-edited with Linda Hopkins) is published by Karnac Books.