This creative working session responds to the conference theme of trust, mistrust, and community by engaging directly with one of the most difficult inheritances of psychosocial studies: the archive of psychoanalysis itself. Psychoanalysis has a deeply problematic history of homophobic and transphobic theory and practice that still influences clinical practice today. Trust, in these circumstances, can be difficult, even dangerous. But psychoanalytic theory can also provide radical ways of thinking about desire and identity, and affirmative clinical practice can provide valuable space for patients/clients to dream of queer and trans futures. Psychoanalysis remains a site of ambivalence, investment, and critique for clinicians, scholars, and patients alike.

The session is structured as a facilitated zine-making workshop that invites participants to encounter archival psychoanalytic texts on gender and sexuality alongside other materials, including fragments of queer and trans histories and their own writing or art. Participants will be invited to cut, disrupt, annotate, and reassemble archival materials, producing new texts or objects that register both damage and possibility.

The workshop treats mistrust and refusal as a meaningful psychosocial response to abuse of power, traumatic histories and presents, and lived experience. By working creatively with the archive, the session aims to open a space for an encounter with its violence. The intention is not to heal these wounds, but to translate them into something meaningful, at least for a moment. We hope to provoke reflection on how trust is built, broken, and sometimes prematurely demanded in situations of ongoing violence. Creative practice is used as a mode of shared inquiry, allowing participants to remain in relation without forcing consensus, endurance, or reconciliation.

This creative workshop is oriented towards and facilitated by queer and trans people with lived experience of psychotherapy, and also invites in the broader psychosocial studies community.