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The George Washington University Department of Psychiatry convened its 31st annual Daniel S. Prager M.D. Lectureship in Psychoanalytic Psychiatry on April 7, 2011. The guest speaker was Adrienne E. Harris, Ph.D., whose presentation was entitled “Many Genders, Gender Hybrids, No Gender: Gender as Soft Assembly.” This annual lectureship was made possible through a gift by friends in memory of Daniel S. Prager, M.D. Prager was for many years a practicing psychoanalyst and teacher in the Washington psychoanalytic community, affiliated with the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. This annual lectureship has grown into an annual visiting professorship and has a long line of distinguished thinkers in psychoanalytic thinking including Otto Kernberg, Glen Gabbard, and Hilda Bruch.
Harris is currently Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology at New York University Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and Faculty and Training Analyst for the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She is also author of the book Gender as Soft Assembly. Her interest in gender began with her involvement in the feminist movement and her background in relational psychoanalysis, influenced by Hans Loewald. She explained that the foundation of relational ideas is steeped in the concept that all experience is based on a two-person phenomenon, that there is no self without an intersubjective matrix. This matrix also extends beyond the dyad and incorporates social forces. That is, class, gender, identity, and sexuality are transmitted to us inter-generationally. It is in this framework, she opined, that the doubleness of the analyst itself can be appreciated as a tool for both control and freedom.