Gender: A Contemporary Introduction

Gender: A Contemporary Introduction offers a sophisticated exploration of gender through a psychoanalytic lens, moving beyond binary frameworks to present gender as a fluid, kaleidoscopic state of mind shaped by cultural narratives, unconscious fantasies, and libidinal attachments.

Oren Gozlan presents a critical re-examination of psychoanalytic theories of gender and its relation to sexuality, examining how and why we are invested in it through a comprehensive psychoanalytic approach. The volume provides novel conceptualizations of gender and transitioning, offering original metaphors for new ways of listening to gender in clinical practice. Each chapter considers multiple vantage points including social, cultural, therapeutic, experiential, and theoretical perspectives on gender, exploring the interplay between cultural, political, and conceptual shifts. The book places in tension the concept of gender as a social identity, subject position, emotional situation, and state of mind, engaging the contradictions between these differing viewpoints. By redefining gender as a psychoanalytic object that can only be approached indirectly through fantasy, relation, and the unconscious, Gozlan provides clinicians with fresh conceptual tools to navigate these complex territories.

This book is an ideal guide for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and social workers seeking enhanced clinical understanding of gender diversity. It is also an essential resource for training institutes and graduate programmes in psychology, gender studies, and related fields.

Oren Gozlan is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst based in Ontario, Canada. He is the author of Gender with Sexuality: Situations of Psychoanalytic Learning (2025) and Transsexuality and the Art of Transitioning: A Lacanian Approach (2014), and the editor of Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies: In Transition (2018).