About the Instructor

Dr. Laura Caghan is a psychologist and psychoanalyst specializing in gender. She teaches, consults, and speaks on gender at conferences. Working from contemporary psychoanalytic perspectives, Dr. Caghan is also active at the Newport Psychoanalytic Institute, where she serves as President and a faculty member. With offices in Irvine and Garden Grove, California, Dr. Caghan’s other clinical interests include early trauma, depression, anxiety, LGBTQ issues, work and creativity.

Working With Gender Diversity

About this Course

This advanced course includes 9 monthly meetings for reading, discussion and consultation. Our emphasis will be on the therapy process, with opportunities to apply our thinking to specific cases. Readings will be chosen from recent psychoanalytic articles and gender-related research, with topics including eating disorders, nonbinary identities, people who experience alternating genders, gender diversity and dissociative identity disorder, clinical implications for transmales with phantom phenomena, and unconscious inhibitions that impede clinical work with diversity/differences. Prerequisites: New class members are expected to have an intermediate-to-advanced understanding of TGNC issues. A phone interview with the instructor is required before registering for the class.

Course Objectives

• Differentiate the constructs of gender orientation and sexual orientation.
• Explain the WPATH Standards of Care’s requirements for mental health clinicians assisting clients who seek gender-affirming surgeries.
• Describe 3 countertransference pitfalls that may prolong or derail the treatment of gender diverse people.