Toward a Horizon of Potential:

Longing, Phobia, and Queerness in Psychoanalysis and Beyond

with Sam Guzzardi, LCSW

Wednesday, November 5 2025

8:30 – 10:00 PM (EST)

Description: In this presentation Sam Guzzardi will share an abridged version of his paper “Toward a Horizon of Potential: Longing, Phobia, and Queerness in Psychoanalysis and Beyond,” which was awarded the Tiresias Prize of the International Psychoanalytical Association.  The paper takes a close look at a brief encounter with a prospective patient who insists on knowing whether the prospective analyst is a “biological gay man” despite being told the analyst identifies as a “queer person.”  It wonders about how the notion of queerness may elicit forms of regulatory anxiety and regulatory violence. Borrowing from the work of Jill Gentile, the feminine and the vaginal are taken up as organizing/disorganizing paradigms in both methodology and content; the paper also interrogates the rhetorical move of deploying the logics of biology in the prospective patient’s inquiry.  Ultimately, the author leans on the notion of queer potentiality developed by José Esteban Muñoz to dream forward another, more generative version of the interaction.

Sam Guzzardi, LCSW is a New York City-based psychoanalyst trained at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, IPSS.  His written work on gender and sexuality in psychoanalysis has won numerous awards, including the Ralph Roughton Award of the American Psychoanalytic Association and, most recently, the 2025 Tiresias Award of the International Psychoanalytic Association.  He is on the faculty of the National Institute of the Psychotherapies (NIP) and IPSS, and is an Associate Editor at Psychoanalysis, Self, and Context and at Psychoanalytic Inquiry.  His clinical work focuses on questions of gender, trauma, development, sexuality, and loss.

Please note:

*Attendance is free, but registration is required.

**LGBTQ Study Group meetings are held on Zoom and they are not recorded.

For inquiries regarding The LGBTQ Study Group please contact

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