Description: The Tiresias Salon is a bi-weekly, trans-centered, international psychoanalytic reading group committed to exploring how psychoanalysis can illuminate questions of gender, race, desire, embodiment, violence, and their relationship to the unconscious. This year’s readings are inspired by member’s input and by an interest in current social crisis relating to: trans identity, decolonized and political clinical praxis, the rise in fascism, social dreaming, critiques of liberal subjectivity, colonial relations, free clinics, and difficult feelings like ambivalence, frustration, and love.

At the Tiresias Salon, we come as together as trans and queer clinicians, scholars, and community members who have a shared interest in the radical potential of psychoanalytic thought when it is unapologetically politicized and reimagined at the margins. Annual readings may include classic texts by Freud, Lacan, and Winnicott; peripheralized analysts such as Frantz Fanon and Sabina Spielrein; and contemporary work in trans studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory, disability studies, critical race theory and related fields.

The group is an experiment in collective study and is open to anyone curious about psychoanalysis, whether newcomers or experienced readers. Our aim is not mastery, but a shared experience of holding complexity, to wrestling with difficult texts, and experimenting with reading as a practice of transference and transition. Participants may be seeking to reflect on dynamics in their clinical practice, engaging psychoanalysis in their scholarship or writing, or be interested in using psychoanalysis in realms of activism or art.