Pablo Picasso, The Red Armchair, 1931

Workshop on the Phantasm 

The Child’s Phantasm and the Child of Phantasm 

Catherine Vanier 

Saturday, April 25, 2026 • 10:00 AM – 12:30 PM

“The unconscious,” says Lacan in his Seminar XXV, The Moment to Conclude (15th class, November 1979), “is quite precisely the hypothesis that we don’t dream only when we’re asleep.” Everyone tells themselves stories, and children too love to invent worlds, magical ones, in response to the various questions they ask themselves. It’s their phantasmatic world we receive and work with in analytic sessions. Through a clinical case we will see how the phantasm is constructed for a child, and how a child too can be constituted as the object of a phantasm.

Suggested readings: Freud: “A Child Is Being Beaten” (1919). Lacan: Seminars V, Formations of the Unconscious (1957-58) and XIV, The Logic of the Phantasm (1966-67). Mannoni, Maud: The Child, His ‘Illness,’ and the Others (1967/1970) and The Backward Child and His Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study (1964/1972). 

Catherine Vanier practices psychoanalysis in Paris. She is a member of Espace Analytique, heads L’École Expérimentale de Bonneuil-sur-Marne, and is a faculty member of Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association. Besides many books in French, she has published in English (as Catherine Mathelin) Lacanian Psychotherapy with Children: The Broken Piano, and (as Catherine Vanier) Premature Birth: The Baby, the Doctor and the Psychoanalyst (1917, Karnac Press).

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Transference and Phantasm

Alain Vanier 

Saturday, April 25, 2026 • 1:30 PM – 4:00 PM 

To connect transference with the phantasm is to question the status of repetition in treatment and the possibility of an end of analysis. Regarding that end, however, over the course of his teaching, Lacan comes to place less stress on the phantasm than on the symptom.

Suggested readings: Lacan: Seminars X, Angst (1962-63) and XIV, The Logic of the Phantasm (1966-67) and XXIV, L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre (1976-77); “Radiophonie” (1970) and “L’Étourdit” (1973). 

Alain Vanier is a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, and an emeritus professor at the Université Paris VII Diderot. He is a vice-president of Espace Analytique and an Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association faculty member. Among his most recent books are Une introduction à la psychanalyse (Colin, 2018) and Épistémologie et méthodologie en psychanalyse et en psychiatrie (érès, 2017). In English translation, the Other Press has published his monograph Lacan.

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Location: In-person in NYC and online via Zoom.

Fee (for full day): $80; for students with ID: $20. Registration details to follow.