Amy Taylor | Fielding Graduate University (original) (raw)

I am a member of the staff and teaching faculty at the Austen Riggs Center, a non-restrictive, open, residential psychiatric hospital. There, I engage patients in existential-phenomenology and psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy, and work with them to recognize the context for their disturbances and liberate them from its grasp. At Austen Riggs, I also coordinate the Friday Night Guest Lecture series, bringing in a range of speakers to critically illuminate and energize local clinical and academic audiences, and host the critical inquiry and advocacy group, meaningmatterscommunity.org. I maintain a small private practice for adults, adolescents, and couples. I am on the faculty at Bard College at Simon's Rock, where I teach courses informed by phenomenology, feminism, critical psychology, and psychoanalysis.

About my dissertation (defended 3/23/12):
I'm taking a deep look at a first-person narrative from a man who, like many men, develops complete physiological impotence following typical prostatectomy and androgen-deprivation treatment for prostate cancer. After spending some time feeling depressed about what he believed was the permanent loss of his sexual life and important part of his sense of self, he was convinced by a close lesbian friend to use a strap-on dildo. He was skeptical at first, but then surprised to find that using the dildo for sex brings him sexual satisfaction, including orgasm-- the dildo transforms "from object to organ"; that is, it goes from being an external device to something he experiences as a part of his body, even at the level of sensation. He also finds that his identity shifts with the "in-corporation" of this technology; that is, he experiences changes to his gender identity and expansion of his sexual horizon, and finds that the dildo is not simply a prosthetic penis but a postgender bodily extension open to playful interpretation. My dissertation explores the implications of this at once surprising and yet likely commonplace but under-represented phenomenon not only for people with concerns explicitly related to sexuality, but, since we are all sexual, gendered, and embodied beings, for human sexuality and human corporeality broadly in terms of how to think about the relationships between the physical body and gender identity and between the body and technology. This includes using the case study narrative as a locus for dialogue between feminist phenomenological and feminist poststructural thought on the question of the relationship between the material body and identity. The dissertation includes implications for clinical practice; that is, it includes a discussion of how my findings may guide the way clinicians take up sexual "dysfunctions" and work with persons with non-binary or flexible gender identities, as well as implications for how to think about embodiment and identity in any human being. It reinforces the notion that human beings are our bodies/ necessarily embodied subjects, but that what we think of as "bodies" are more complex, expansive, and varied than the boundaries of the skin imply. It also reminds clinicians to keep in mind and take seriously their patients' past and present experiences of their own bodies since bodily experience is the first (and as I argue, ongoing) way one develops a sense of oneself (as "body ego").

Other interests include:
Identity formation/ construction/ representation, psychology of embodiment and the relationship between the body and identity, and how technology (particularly internet technology) changes or reveals this relationship. Feminist theory in psychology, particularly integrating social constructionist theory with psychodynamic theories. Ethnomethodology/ the everyday practices through which the social order is produced, particularly how people are constituted as gendered, as intellectually disabled, and as psychologically disordered. Individualized collaborative assessment--using psychological assessment psychotherapeutically. Extending the reach of psychoanalytic treatment to those who have been historically regarded as untreatable or unreachable.

These days, I'm particularly interested in: expanding and deepening my dissertation work with an eye toward clinical practice, reconciling psychoanalytic and phenomenological discourse by thinking about the importance of the skin, and understanding how one becomes constituted as a professional or an authority.

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