NICOLAS EVZONAS, PhD

Refracted Time, Gender, and the Analyst’s Trans Becomings

Wednesday, October 1 2025

8:30 – 10:00 PM (EST)

Description: This presentation articulates the psychoanalytic concept of shattered temporality with gender. According to Freud, the process of subject formation is the outcome of multiple post-hoc elucidations of one’s own experience in the framework of an intrapsychic logic. By contrast, Jean Laplanche emphasizes the intersubjective dimension of afterwardsness, which finds its ultimate raison d’être in the transference, where the analysand discovers new meanings of his or her experience at different and deferred times thanks to the analyst’s meaningful interpretations, thus promoting a novel subjectivizing process. Based on the Laplanchian framework and interdisciplinary thinking, the author moves away from the traditional psychoanalytic conception of gender as a solipsistic construction and fixed identity. He instead argues that gender constitutes an intersubjective process and a “narrative identity” (Ricoeur) that is endlessly rewritten under the sway of afterwardsness and in constant relation to the other(s) (i.e., family, peers, society, culture). Accordingly, he proposes to establish transness as the epistemological paradigm of psychoanalytic temporality and becomingness. The speaker further understands the violent reactions of certain analysts towards trans analysands as a revival of the analyst’s own traumatic narrative of gender, infantile sexuality, and primary terrors of formlessness. Finally, he illustrates how the working-through of the analyst’s countertransference agitations is likely to transform not only the analysand but also the analyst, who undergoes multiple transitions, detransitions, and retransitions within the inter-psychic, inter-temporal, and inter-processual space of the analytic treatment.

Nicolas Evzonas (PhD in Literature and PhD in Psychopathology and Psychoanalysis) is a Greek Cypriot Paris-based therapist in private practice. He is a candidate to the French Psychoanalytical Association (APF, IPA) and Associate Professor with tenure in Clinical Psychology at the University of Paris. Nicolas has written numerous papers on clinical and applied psychoanalysis published in Greek, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan peer-reviewed journals, as well as essays on films, theatre, and literature. He is the author of the French book Devenirs trans de l’analyste [Trans Becomings of the Analyst], which is currently being translated in four European languages. He is also co-editor of the Psychoanalytic Inquiry issue on “Sexualities, Gender, Class, and Race: A Psychoanalytic View from France” (2020) and editor of a double special issue of The Psychoanalytic Review on “Trans* Becomings and Countertransference” (2021 & 2022). His latest projects are a guest-edited French-based issue for Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2023) on perversion and a forthcoming edited volume on Trauma and Sexuality (2026), which gathers together psychoanalytic clinicians and scholars from all over the world.

For inquiries regarding The LGBTQ Study Group please contact

Esin Egit, PhD LP at e.egit@wawhite.org