Patricia Gherovici, PhD, 2020
/Dr. Gherovici’s work with marginalized communities began with Latinx and expanded to include gender and sexual variant people. Addressing the complexities of delivering mental health services to disenfranchised and/or impoverished communities, her work is at the forefront of a change within psychoanalysis. In a departure from traditional psychoanalysis, the new form of psychoanalytic practice she has been developing is oriented toward progressive social transformations for people segregated by “oppressive notions of normalcy.”
Before most people within psychoanalysis were thinking about speaking about intersectionality, Dr. Gherovici was working to illuminate how race, trans and queer studies intersected problematically with psychoanalysis. Her work with trans and gender nonconforming analysands has contributed to the emerging new field “transpsychoanalytics.”
Her award-winning book The Puerto Rican Syndrome opened a more sustained conversation about psychoanalysis and community and directly inspired collective work such as the 2014 Symposium: Psychoanalysis in El Barrio at the New School for Social Research, as well as the PEP WEB documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio (2016) and her co-edited collection Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class and the Unconscious (2019). She also authored Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (2010) and Transgender Psychoanalysis (2017). All of these works challenged the assumption that psychoanalysis is only effective for those who can afford it, directly referencing her work, which advocates for transcending barriers of money, class, gender, sexuality and race.
Originally from Argentina, Dr. Gherovici is a psychoanalyst who serves as Associated Faculty for the Psychoanalytic Studies Minor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group.