Psychoanalytic Training in the School of Lacan - Part 8

“The goal of my teaching has always been, and remains, to train analysts.”
—Lacan, Seminar XI, 209

What does it take to train as a Lacanian psychoanalyst? Lacan’s famous return to the truth of Freud is a major critique of what has gone wrong with Psychoanalysis. Freud’s students have deviated from the radical core of Freud’s work and regressed to what Lacan had characterized many a time as a return to “General Psychology.” Lacan’s return to Freud is nothing short of a proposal for analytic training that is true to the spirit of the unconscious, to an ethics indicated by desire and later by the drive.

At the heart of this training—from one’s analysis, control analysis, attending seminars, organizing and participating in cartels, teaching, la passe, and being involved in the activities of the School—is the question of whether or not one finally gets to assume the analytic position, the discourse of the analyst, and continues to be involved in the many aspects of the transmission of the truth of Lacan and Freud.

It has been said, and Lacan said so himself, that most of his seminars and writing are about training analysis.

This project involves not just the usual reading and familiarizing with Lacanian concepts—for example, the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real—but reading these categories to analyze how they guide and inform the training, technique, and practice of analysis. This school year, our main focus is desire and its interpretation

This year-round seminar is designed to help candidates and precandidates as they traverse their singular journey to becoming a Lacanian-Freudian psychoanalyst.