A CONVERGENCIA COLLOQUIUM
Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association and the Department of Philosophy of the New School for Social Research

Act and Transmission: On Formation in Psychoanalysis
OCTOBER 28–30, 2011
The New School for Social Research

READING MATERIALS FOR THE CONFERENCE

In the English-speaking tradition, becoming an analyst has been referred to as the training of an analyst. The notion of "training" reveals and conveys a misunderstanding of the trajectory proper to the formation of the analyst, a misunderstanding of both the clinical act and its transmission.

"Training,” suggests an apprenticeship in knowledge, conceived of as a set of procedures to develop a practical expertise. It does not reflect the specificity of the analytic act, which implies the passage through a novel experience that provokes a subjective transformation and the possibility of the assumption of a new ethical position. The notion of "formation," from the Latin formare (to give form to), is more consistent with the uniqueness of such an act.

Since Après-Coup introduced the signifier “formation” into the psychoanalytic milieu, many colleagues and associations in the English-speaking world have begun to adopt it. To reflect on this term in this international encounter is an opportunity to sustain essential aspects of psychoanalytic ethics, its difference and its transmission.

Psychoanalysts from Europe, South America, and Unites States will attend this Colloquium to explore the specificity of the analytic formation, addressing the formations of the unconscious, the analysand’s parcours, the psychoanalytic act, the transformation and the passage to a different subjective position - underlining the fundamental question of transmission in psychoanalysis.

How can we think of transmission today, in our current cultural situation, characterized by, among other things, the dissemination of institutionalized normative training and the intrusion of the legal domain into the field of psychoanalysis?

Posing questions of formation in this way calls up the opposition between the normative and the particular on the one hand and the universal and the singular on the other. How today can we further our thinking about the relation between singularity and universality?

Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association will host colleagues from: Corpo Freudiano Escola de Psicanálise (Brazil); Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires (Argentina); Escuela de Psicoanálisis Sigmund Freud de Rosario (Argentina); Espace Analytique (France); Insistance (France); Le Cercle freudien (France); Nodi italiani (Italy); and Seminario psicoanalítico de Tucumán (Argentina)

The colloquium is the second public encounter of an ongoing Convergencia International Working Group, which is studying the topic: What can we expect from an analysis?

Après-Coup Convergencia Colloquium Schedule