Psychoanalysis in its Place and Time: the analytic act and its production, a Los Angeles Seminar

This seminar considers the analytic experience, or discourse, as one in which the analyst’s offer creates the conditions of possibility for the advent of a singular subject called upon to act in its place and time according to an ethics of desire, jouissance, and the work of the drive, or that thing set to work in the speaking being as subject to speech, language, and the excess, or jouissance. As an experience, psychoanalysis is necessarily linked to the ruptures made by unconscious formations.

The seminar will be organized around the topics of the work of the dream, the symptom, and the logic of fantasy as an articulation of the subject of the unconscious in relationship to desire and jouissance as they are set to work in the life of the speaking-being in their place and time. As an in-person seminar, each meeting of the seminar will offer a Freudian-Lacanian practitioner working in the greater Los Angeles area the opportunity to present their clinical work based upon their experience of the analytic encounter, or clinical engagement, as it relates to what Lacan referred to as “factor C,” or the cultural factor in his essay “The Function and Field of Speech and Language.”