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Adolescents affected by violence express a strong desire to learn at school. However, once there, whether affected by armed conflict, structural violence, the school-to-prison pipeline, or other traumatic experiences, they [...]

Beginning with Kohut's classic 1959 paper on the subject, empathy has been conceptualized as a process of finding something in one's self (introspection) that has resonance with one's experience of the other. This paper, inspired by advances in queer studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the Black American theater, identifies the limitations of this understanding. By putting Kohut's ideas about empathy in dialogue with French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, Black American playwrights Jeremy O. Harris, Michael R. Jackson, and James Ijames, and the author's own clinical experience, a queered empathy is theorized that relies less on self-reference and more on passibility. The theoretical and clinical implications of this shift are explored, and the possibilities for a queered Psychology of the Self that contain a heightened possibility for responsiveness to marginalized experience are suggested. The hope of this paper is that the reader, from a multidisciplinary perspective, will be inspired to imagine a psychoanalysis and Self Psychology for all that has the potential to flourish for generations to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychoanalytic thinking about gender is shifting in new and exciting ways. Over the past several decades, theories from feminist and queer studies have found their way into psychoanalytic theorizing, challenging heretofore bedrock notions around binary gender and Oedipal development. Even more recently, queer theories of trans phenomenon and the experience of transgender patients and analysts have been receiving attention in the literature. This paper expands on these developments, positing that traumatic—particularly transphobic—experience can have a foreclosing impact on softly assembled gender states, and that play within the psychoanalytic relationship can reawaken traumatically collapsed gender states. Special attention is paid to gender states that exist on the "transgender edge." In considering such experiences, the paper underscores the importance of an ethos of fluidity, fluctuation and movement rather than a phased, vectored developmental identity model in thinking about non-normative gender experience. The potential utility of such an ethos for all persons, regardless of identity, is also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses two educational intervention programs: one in Northern Uganda, a region heavily impacted by length armed conflict, and one in Oakland, California, an area experiencing decades of neglect, divestment, structural racism and social violence. It is found that for children, violence in the community often leads to further exposure to violence in the home. In addition, a hypothesis that classroom-based psychosocial intervention targeting cognitive capacities could positively influence educational outcomes for students impacted by armed conflict.