Presenter: Lee Zevy
Description:
We are currently experiencing a confusing destabilizing revolution of all aspects of sexuality and gender as evolving heterosexual and LGBTQI+ definitions, meanings, identities, categories, and behavior undergo dramatic changes. Although in many ways, these changes are occurring worldwide, each country and culture is determining how it integrates or tries to inhibit what is happening.
In many ways, this process harkens back to other clinical revolutions, like the advent of psychoanalysis and when Gestalt therapy and the other experiential therapies changed the relationality of the therapeutic environment.
For clinicians, gender fluidity can be a confusing array of categories, identifiers, and meanings that have to be negotiated with each client.
During this presentation, I’ll ground the current evolution of gender fluidity historically and then focus on the ways it affects the field clinically. Exercises in breakout groups will allow participants to experience, play with, and discuss their relation to this unfolding process. Then we will re-form into the whole group to continue discussion and uncover emerging themes.
Biography:
Lee Zevy is one of the founders of Identity House, a walk-in peer counseling and psychotherapy community mental health center for the LGBTQI+ community in New York City, which began in 1971. After completing her training at the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, where she is now a fellow, she became the clinical director of Identity House for many years and still does supervising and training there. In addition to becoming president of NYIGT twice, she teaches, supervises, writes, and publishes on the theory and practice of Gestalt therapy. Her current interest is how the fluidity of gender and sexuality today is moving to change the discourse of society around these topics.