Lesbian Love, Identity, Sexuality: Worki ng with Clients

Catalog description

Students will enter into a journey that aims to honor the Lesbian as a whole and complete person with her own psyche, soul, developmental organization, historical, and unfolding liberational potential. As part of this journey, students will be provided with a rich and textured Lesbian- affirmative theory of Lesbian identity and psychological development, charting a potential path on how therapists and their clients alike can learn how to embody a healthy and eroticized Lesbian sense of self. We will examine some of the ways in which psychoanalytic theorists such as Freud and others have attempted to explain the phenomenon of erotic love between women promulgating the millennial homophobia that denies Lesbians her own personhood, thus continuing the tragic legacy of internalized lesbianphobia and misogyny for women who love women. We will also examine ways in which modern Lesbian-affirmative theorists and activists have heroically worked under oppressive conditions towards a reclaiming of Lesbian selfhood by tackling these heterosexist and lesbian-phobic psychological dilemmas. This workshop will introduce students to how to work with the particular trauma associated with growing up Lesbian in a heterosexist and heteronormative world by working with the idea of The Sapphic Complex, a concept of lesbian development, in order for budding therapists to learn how to help all Lesbians achieve self-liberation within the clinical setting.