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Seminar I. – With and Beyond Freud

In this opening seminar, I will first discuss my own initial encounter with Lacan and how it shaped my engagement with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and my clinical training. The main part of the seminar will be devoted to a series of questions that have permeated and disrupted the Lacanian movement since its inception. What does it mean to be a Lacanian psychoanalyst? What is the difference between Lacanian psychoanalysis and other psychoanalytic traditions? How does a Lacanian psychoanalyst practice? I will endeavour to answer these questions from a negative as well as a positive angle, illustrating my comments with concrete clinical examples. As a preliminary conclusion and in preparation for the second seminar, I will then outline the meaning of Lacan’s famous ‘return to Freud’ by comparing the Lacanian approach with Freud’s original conception of psychoanalytic practice.

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Seminar II. – Time for Technique

The second seminar will be entirely devoted to Lacanian psychoanalytic technique and my own implementation of the key technical precepts that Lacan advanced. As such, I will first describe how Lacanian clinical practice revolves around three, hierarchically structured clinical principles: interpretation, transference, and the position of the analyst. I will explain how these principles relate to each other and how I implement them in my own psychoanalytic practice. With regard to the position of the analyst, I will also unpack what Lacan called ‘the discourse of the psychoanalyst’, which will allow me to present some of Lacan’s ideas pertaining to the goal of the psychoanalytic treatment. Finally, I will address the issue that remains the most controversial aspect of the Lacanian approach: the variable-length session and, more broadly, the analyst’s active employment of time as a psychoanalytic technique.