PSYCHOANALYTIC TEACHING

The Clinical Cases Seminar in Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Individuals who have completed the Training Seminar cycle, have undertaken (or are completing) a personal analysis, and who are practicing as psychoanalysts or preparing to do so in the near future, are eligible to enroll in the Clinical Cases Seminar. Teachings by Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron and Lucie Cantin alternate with clinical case presentations by a small number of participants, who are asked to prepare presentations guided by a specific set of questions each year. All participants work together in groups on these clinical presentations and sustain collective work throughout the year.

The focus of the Seminar is The Analytic Act.

Psychoanalysis is an ethical practice. Such a practice takes its source in a specific experience, which mobilizes the confrontation of the subject of the unconscious with a lack hollowed out in the being by the defect of a jouissance. In each case a singular logic sustains the development of the analytic experience until its term. The triggering of such an experience is what is expected of the psychoanalyst. This supposes therefore that the psychoanalyst, beyond the person who takes on the role, appears in the consequences of his act. In the psychoanalytic clinic the control verifies the ways which allow for retracing, from the consequences in the analysand, the act which caused them in the psychoanalyst. The opening of the field of the Other, effacing all the imaginary and narcissistic stakes of the therapeutic relation founded on the ego-you relation, triggers the experience that leaves the subject alone with the unconscious, his signifiers, the jouissance of the Other, and the phantasm.

The subject’s solitude with the signifier, its defect, and the desire of the Other, supposes that what operates in the psychoanalyst--the object (a) put to work at the end of his analysis--is what causes the triggering of the analytic experience for the analysand. The analysand’s unconscious, the signifier of his dream, as well as the signifier’s chaining in his associations, do not refer to the analyst’s ego, but to the object that causes the analyst as a subject of desire. The analyst’s ethic is to confine himself to this object that makes a defect in the chaining of the signifier in the analysand’s unconscious. This removal of the ego or of the person of the analyst in relation to the object at work in his act, is at the basis of the subject’s experience of the confrontation with an irreducible lack in the analysand’s unconscious. The analyst’s act in the transference amounts to the effraction that causes this object in the analysand, in so far as it is lacking to him and reactivates in him the irreducible lack of an inaccessible object.

The disarray that the effraction of such an act creates and the anguish accompanying the proximity to such a lack, triggers in the analysand that response of the drive which mobilizes in the letter of his body everything of the Other’s jouissance that was already inscribed in his being. The experience that begins with this triggering, will follow the tortuous logic of a phantasm, where what causes the analysand as subject will have to find its way. This occurs unless the analyst clings to the symptom that allows him to enjoy his phantasm, without confronting the lack which causes him, thereby becoming an obstacle to the work of the letter constitutive of the analysand’s unconscious. The analyst’s symptom thus nourishes the analysand’s resistance in his refusal of savoir and consolidates his defences against castration. The clinical control interrogates these places and impasses where the ethical strategies that accompany and determine the analytic experience are decided, just as the pass will unveil its hazards for the Savoir of the School.

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Supplemental Teachings

In the year between each iteration of the Training and Clinical Cases seminars, Spiiral offers two teaching days to supplement each seminar. Each session is three hours long.

For the Training Seminar cycle that began in June 2024, the supplemental teachings will focus on “Man / Woman” and “The Feminine in the Analytic Experience,” and will be held on October 19, 2024 and March 8, 2025. These supplemental teachings are intended solely for seminar participants, who will receive registration information by email.

For the Clinical Cases Seminar cycle that began in June 2024, the supplemental sessions will be held on October 11, 2024 and March 22, 2025.