This seminar will focus on clinical work with children, returning to relevant psychoanalytic readings and discussing clinical material brought by participants. Open to participants who work with children.

Alain Didier-Weill’s stage depiction of the crucial debates taking place in Vienna in 1913 addresses the relevance of the racism of the time as well as the controversy between Freud and Jung on basic concepts that involve both psychoanalysis and politics. These tensions, as well as transposing them into a contemporary setting, in the film V13, will be addressed.

When words are not heard but overheard, when phrases are perceived in bits and pieces, and when speakers, failing to do as they intend, state things they never meant to say, the saying, in its unsteady relation to understanding, becomes an event. That event has long been studied by prophets, priests and rabbis, poets and philosophers, linguists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, novelists and filmmakers. Far Calls explores the powers of sonorous coincidence and the varieties of reading that it incites.

This clinical group will be oriented to the unique challenges and opportunities we encounter in hospitals, clinics, prisons, treatment programs, schools, and other institutions. We will explore the often surprising possibilities the analyst has to create and sustain space for the singular even in settings dominated by claims to the universal. Open to those currently working clinically in or with institutions.

Lacan’s position on transference in psychosis is complex and evolves significantly throughout his teaching. Unlike in neurosis, where transference is structured around the logic of the subject-supposed-to-know, in psychosis its status is more problematic due to the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father. This seminar will explore how transference in psychosis can be approached not through interpretation in the traditional sense, but as an art of invention — a clinical orientation guided by the singular solutions each subject forges.

Apocalypse is a literary genre that arose in dramatic circumstances: born of crisis, it decries the political violence of its time while envisioning the possibility of recovery for its victims. We will study how John’s Apocalypse maps a path of resilience for an oppressed community, and expand upon its significance for social and political movements.

This workshop will explore the philosophical references that ground Freud’s and Lacan’s positions on religion. Reckoning with the plurality of languages informing the reflection on religion, we will explore the impact of Feuerbach’s thinking on Freud, as well as Kierkegaard’s and Bentham’s theories on Lacan.

In his last and longest dialogue, Plato deals with the creation of a just system of legislation for the colony the Cretan Clinias must found. The conversation on a hot summer day among Clinias, an unnamed Athenian, and the Spartan Megillus raises crucial questions about the divine or human origins of the laws and their role in the city. We will examine how the dialogue also considers the kind of transference the legislator must establish to create a stable bond among citizens and between each citizen and the legislation itself.

Contrary to being an intersubjective phenomenon, Lacan connects transference in analysis with a particular object he isolates in his seminar on Transference as the agalma, a hidden, precious object of desire enclosed in the other, and the antecedent of his notion of object a.

We will read selected chapters of Seminar VIII, Transference (1960-61).

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the “hole” is not simply a physical absence, but a concept linked to the topology and structure of the subject. Lacan, using the surface of the torus, makes it a paradoxical element: the hole, far from being reduced to a pure lack, constitutes a point of intersection between the subject and the Other, between the demand and the object.

For Freud, sublimation accounts for the fundamental achievements of civilization. It is the destiny of the drive, whose satisfaction is anchored in the social link. We will study the logic of sublimation and its relation to the phantasm, which supports the subject's desire.

Topic to be announced.

The book addresses two critical disturbances to the earliest mother-child relation: pregnancy and post-partum for women labelled “psychotic,” and the intensive care of gravely premature newborns. Through them, we discover that a mother’s granting of subjecthood is what allows the necessary separation that sustains newborn life.

In this workshop, Catherine Vanier will discuss “The Child’s Phantasm and the Child of Phantasm” in the morning and Alain Vanier will discuss “Transference and Phantasm” in the afternoon.