COLLOQUIUM FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 2025 (Zoom)

In contemporary psychoanalysis, it has become popular to accuse the clinical field of hating sex, hating pleasure, and being generally – both in its theory and in its techniques – hostile and averse to sex and sexuality. Although this isn’t a particularly new argument – French psychoanalysis has been accusing American psychoanalysis of this in one form or another for the past seventy-five years – the argument has taken on new momentum with the popularization of queer theory. In this presentation, I will draw on the work of Jean Laplanche to challenge this popular argument by showing that it depends on a simplistic version of queer theory that totally misrecognizes its radical potential. In so doing, I will demonstrate that to the extent we are afraid of sexuality it may have less to do with sensational, exotic or shattering sex, but sexuality in relation to otherness, desire that thrusts and propels us toward others in ways we can’t comprehend and can’t quite escape. I elaborate Laplanche’s account of “enlarged sexuality” to elaborate “erotophobia” as the denial of enlarged sexuality.

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Gila Ashtor, PhD, LP is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychoanalysis at Columbia University. She is also on the Faculty at New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and at IPTAR. She is the author of three books, Homo Psyche: On Queer Theory and Erotophobia (Fordham UP, 2021), Exigent Psychoanalysis: The Interventions of Jean Laplanche (Routledge, 2021), and Aural History (Punctum, 2020). Her primary areas of academic and clinical expertise include identity, dissociative disorders, trauma and sexuality. She is in private practice in New York City.

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