Seminars

A year-long, bi-weekly seminar, reading Lacan’s first two Seminars. Beginning again. Each session will be a chapter of the Seminar. This will not be a reading-aloud-together class – rather, each is expected to have read, and – following a mode in this early Lacan – each session will – usually – begin with a participant presenting questions and thoughts about the chapter. We will also read in their entirety Freud’s Beyond The Pleasure Principle; and – aloud, together – Sophocles’ Oedipus At Colonus. It is notable that Lacan, in these first, foundational, remarkable teachings, is at play in the metaphors of light and reflection – and ends, almost thirty years later – like Oedipus himself – in haptic blindness, feeling his way with his hands, signifying with string. Like Oedipus – his end audible in this, his beginning. We read – we are – within the veil of ‘our time’, in which the signifier – structurally empty – is evacuated of this emptiness – thereby making speech expulsion of the other from the contract of sense making. A symptom of Capitalist discourse, yes – but not only: An enlisting of the signifier into the function (already nascent) of suicide vest – speech as detonation destroying communal agreements of meaning. This the regime of the demand of the drive: to eliminate difference. The fissure that is difference is, as a legacy, lived as identity: the mass found in the scan of the person known as ego. So, in such a time – ours – a return to the initial caustic applied to the seeming substantiality of that mass, which was Lacan’s return to the letter of Freud. A threshold, as was Seminar III, to psychosis – here in ‘our time’. Towards tuning an analyst’s ears to a register of speech as solvent – a hearing speaking – these two Seminars are exemplars. Readings: Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I. Freud’s Papers On Technique, 1953-1954. Trans. John Forrester. New York: Norton, 1988. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955. Trans. Sylvia Tomaselli. New York: Norton, 1991. Freud, S. Beyond The Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961. Sophocles. “Oedipus at Colonus,” in Sophocles I. Trans. David Greene. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991. (One of various translations.) Faculty: Matthew Seidman, Candidate Analyst, LSP. Dates and times: Every other Monday, 5-7 pm PT, 8-10 pm ET 9/28/26 - 6/28/27 Location: Virtual Contact: half.outside.it@gmail.com Fee: $25/class or school tuition; none turned away.

This seminar introduces a close reading of Freud’s 1930 treatise, exploring the structural antagonism between individual drive and the demands of the collective. In the current American political landscape, characterized by intensifying polarizations and the shifting boundaries of the commons, Freud’s insights into the cultural superego and the aggressive underside of communal bonds take on a renewed, albeit ambiguous, urgency. We will examine how the renunciation of drives—once considered the price of entry into civilization—is being renegotiated in a digital and fragmented social field. Readings: Freud, S. Civilization and Its Discontents, (2015). Trans. G. C. Richter. Broadview Press. Faculty: Robert K. Beshara, Ph.D., M.F.A. Dates and times: Thursdays, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM Pacific Time. Weekly for 5 sessions, starting October 1st. Location: Online via Zoom. Contact: besharaster@gmail.com Fee: $100 donation to the school encouraged, none turned away [or school tuition?]

Following Freud and Lacan, we will consider the dream as a rupture and writing of the unconscious from an Other scene, not as a narrative with a hidden meaning. The seminar will consider the field of the Other and the place of the analyst in guiding the analysand to hear the rupture of a dream and its signifiers. The seminar will focus on Lacan’s graph of desire as a structuring logic for subject formation as well as a guide for psychoanalytic treatment. Participants will present dreams from their patients/ analysands several times in the course of the seminar. This is not a case study of the patient, but a case of the-analyst-in training working under constraints of the Lacanian clinic and transference. Presenters will focus on signifiers as traces of dreams and explain their interventions in the unfolding dream work, following the effects of the interventions over time. Respecting the limits of language and the unknown unsayable that comes with dreams, we will listen to the presenter in the place of the analyst speaking to the logic that is at work in her or his interventions. The aim of the seminar is to develop a series of writings ending with a condensed 10-minute writing that highlights the dream logic. As a condition of joining the seminar, everyone will sign a confidentiality agreement. Limited to 12 participants presenting cases with dreams. Readings: Please read or re-read the following foundational texts prior to our first meeting. Freud, S. (1915-16). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XV: Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Part II). Freud, S. (1933). New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII (1932-1936): New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, Lecture XXIX Revision of the Theory of Dreams (pages 6-29). Additional readings will be added monthly during the year. I will continue to draw from Ecrits and Seminar V Lacan, J. (2007). Ecrits (B. Fink, Trans.). WW Norton. Lacan, J. (1998). Seminar 5-Formations of the unconscious. (R Grigg, Trans.). WW Norton. Faculty: Diana Cuello, PhD, Analyst of the School Dates and times: Monthly, September to May, 1st Fridays, 12-2pm Eastern Standard time Location: On Zoom, by invitation Contact: Diana Cuello at dianacuellophd@gmail.com Fee: $500.00 or School Tuition

This two-day seminar provides an overview of Lacan’s fundamental theoretical concepts and does not presuppose prior familiarity with Lacanian theory. After providing an overview of Lacan’s life and seminal influences on his work the instructors will introduce the theory of the signifier to explain Lacan’s theory of the unconscious and of desire, and the formation of the subject. A presentation of the registers of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic will serve as background for a review of other seminal concepts, such as Lacan’s view of narcissism, identification, and the drive, as well as the distinctions between pleasure and jouissance. Faculty: Marcelo Estrada & Diana Dopchiz de Martin Dates and times: Saturday 02/06/2027 and 02/13/2027 – Time: 2PM – 4PM PST Location: Zoom Contact: Marcelo Estrada marcelo.estrada@gmail.com / Diana Dopchiz de Martin ddmartinmft@gmail.com Fee: $50 or School tuition.

The logic and experience of this seminar proposes and assumes a methodology and a praxis: our reading of Freud focuses on the ways in which Lacan’s teaching in his seminar and writing in the Écrits transmits a savoir that orients clinical practice insofar as it welcomes the dream, symptom and unconscious formations as they break through as representative of a censored unconscious. We begin with the question of how the position of the analyst in Lacanian clinical practice creates a frame for the work of the unconscious as it manifests in the speech of the analysand. As participants in the seminar present their cases, our work will be oriented by moments in which unconscious formations make a rupture in the ego’s discourse, and articulate the position of the subject of the unconscious in relation to desire and jouissance. Readings: Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretations of Dreams, Volume IV, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Freud, S (1917). “The Sense of the Symptom,” Volume XI, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Lacan, J. (1991). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (2006). “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principle of its Power,” Écrits, (2006). Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton. Faculty: Christopher Meyer, PhD, Analyst of the School Dates and times: Second and fourth Tuesdays of the month, October 13, 2026 through June 8, 2027, 7-8:20 pm Pacific Time, with a break from December until classes resume January 12, and no class March 23. Location: Online via Zoom Contact: Christopher Meyer, PhD, (323) 930-9662, cmeyerwoeswar@gmail.com Fee: $40.00 per meeting, or LSP Tuition

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.” Readings: Freud, S. Selections from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. J.Strachey. Lacan, J. (2006). “The Function and Field of Speech and Language,” Écrits. (2006). Trans. Bruce Fink, New York: Norton. Faculty: Christopher Meyer, Analyst of the School Dates and times: 4th Saturday of the month October, February, and April, or October 24, February 27, 2027, and April 24, 2027,10:00 am-12 noon Pacific Standard Time Location: TBD, mid-City Los Angeles, California Contact: Christopher Meyer, PhD (323) 930-9662 at cmeyerwoeswar@gmail.com Fee: $60.00 per session/$40.00 students, or LSP tuition

We move on slowly. But this is the real tempo of psychoanalysis because the searching for truth, like what we experience in analysis, takes detours. So in this year’s seminar, we will continue to read Lacan’s Seminar VIII: Transference. We read and we talk. In talking we associate from the text of Lacan, and when we associate we do not know the destination but the signifiers will bring us to it. Readings: Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VIII: Transference. Trans. Bruce Fink. Cambridge：Polity Press, 2015. Faculty: Yang Yu, Cissy Hong Zhou Dates and times: 9:00-11:00 am (Beijing time) Every third and fourth Wednesday each month (from Sept to May) Location: Online Contact: celavieglove@126.com; cissyhongzhou@126.com Fee: US $400 or school tuition

In this seminar, we will continue to retrace the signifying chain of Lacan’s early published seminar, reading aloud and discussing one lecture therefrom each time we meet. Between sessions, participants will be encouraged to read the texts Lacan cites. By proceeding this way, we will revisit Freud’s writings impacted by the effects of an encounter with the symbolic apparatus of Lacan’s teaching and our own speaking in session. Those who are practicing are invited to share any clinical material that resonates with what emerges in our readings and conversations. As a condition for participation, all will sign a confidentiality agreement. We will pick up in Book III - The Psychoses where we left off in June 2026 - about halfway through, but previous participation is not required to join. Upon concluding the seminar (sometime in the winter of 2027), we will move to reading and discussion of more contemporary writing on the Lacanian clinic of psychosis. Readings: Freud, S. Selections from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. J.Strachey. Lacan, J. (1993). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 3: The Psychoses – 1955-1956. Trans. R. Grigg. WW Norton & Company.Schreber, D.P. (2000). Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Trans. I. Macalpine & R. A. Hunter. New York Review of Books.Further readings will be added upon our completion of Seminar III. Faculty: Casey Butcher Dates and times: 1st and 3rd Tuesday of the month at 8:00pm-10pm EST, September 2026 through May 2027. There will be no meeting on the 3rd Tuesday of December. Location: Zoom Contact: butcher.casey@gmail.com Fee: $200 or school tuition

In this seminar, we will revisit Freud’s writing on his clinical work with Ernst Lanzer, a.k.a. The Rat Man, through the lens of Lacan’s theoretical elaboration of the case in “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth.” Further readings will bring to the fore the centrality of the signifier and the punning of reason in Lacanian clinical psychoanalysis and highlight this dimension of Freud’s own practice. We’ll explore psychoanalytic structural psychodiagnostics with an emphasis on the differential diagnosis between hysterical and obsessional neurosis, engage with a recent case history that shares some of the features of the Rat Man case, and explore the aim or ends of analysis as conceptualized by Lacan. Our aim is to demystify and spark interest in Lacanian psychoanalytic practice and invite participants to consider how this tradition may inform their own. Toward this end, in addition to guided discussion of assigned readings, participants will be encouraged to share and discuss clinical work in relation to the material we read. As a condition of joining the seminar everyone will sign a confidentiality agreement. This seminar is limited to 12 participants. Readings: Freud, S. Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909) and other selections from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Gessert, A. “What We Can Still Learn from the Rat Man” in Freud’s Principle Case Studies Revisited (2025). Eds. Helena Texier and Eve Watson. Routledge, (99-108). Lacan, J. Selections from Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (2006). Trans. Bruce Fink. W. W. Norton & Company. Lacan, J. “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth,” Trans. Martha Noel Evans. Psychoanalytic Quarterly (1979), vol. 48. Routledge, (pp.405-425). Lévi-Strauss, C. Selections from Structural Anthropology (1963). Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, Inc. de Saussure, F. Selections from Course in General Linguistics (1915). Trans. Roy Harris. Chicago: Open Court Classics. Rogers, Annie. “Surprising Sounds” in The Unsayable (2007). New York: Ballantine Books, (pp. 97-210). Verhaeghe, Paul. Selections from On Being Normal and Other Disorders: A Manual for Clinical Pscyhodiagnostics (2004). Trans. Sigi Jottkandt. New York: Other Press. Further readings will be added from time to time throughout the year. Faculty: Casey Butcher and John Kreitzberg Dates and times: First Saturday of the month September 2026-May 2027, 11am-1pm EST. January meeting will instead be held on 1/9/27 and May meeting will be held on 5/8/27. Location: In-person only - Philadelphia, PA. Exact location TBD. Contact: butcher.casey@gmail.com & jkreitzbergpsych@gmail.com Fee: $500 or LSP tuition

This seminar elaborates the consequences and results of a change in discourse resulting in the possibility of an analytic experience as one in which a space and time are given to speak about the ruptures the unconscious has made and continues to make in the lived experience of the speaking being. The seminar proposes that the Freudian rupture inaugurates a new social link, which Lacan will formally and logically define through his work on the “analytic discourse” in seminar XVII and following. At the heart of this discourse, or in the position of the agent proper, is the position of the analyst and the analytic act itself as one that makes way for the subject of the unconscious as a barred subject. This seminar will work on the question of the “act” from the perspective of the psychoanalytic experience insofar as it concerns a desire and its cause, jouissance and its work and transformation, and the Thing at work in the life and being of the subject. Readings: Freud, S. Selections from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. J.Strachey. Lacan, J. (2006). “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud,” Écrits. (2006). Trans. Bruce Fink, New York: Norton. Lacan, J. Seminar XV, The Psychoanalytic Act, 1967-1968. Trans., C. Ghallager. Lacan, J. Selections from the Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Seminars XVII, XIX, XX, Encore, and Seminar XXI, Les Non-dupes Errent, 1973-1974. Trans. C. Ghallager Lacan, J. (1990). “Founding Act,” in Television, A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (1990). “Letter of Dissolution,” in Television, A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. New York: Norton. Faculty: Christopher Meyer, Analyst of the School Dates and times: Every 4th Saturday of the month September, November, January, March, May, and June 2026 through 2027, beginning September 26, 10:00 am-12 noon Pacific Standard Time Location: Online via Zoom Contact: Christopher Meyer, PhD (323) 930-9662 at cmeyerwoeswar@gmail.com Fee: $60.00 per session/$40.00 students, or LSP tuition

This peer consultation seminar takes as its crux the radical shift in psychoanalytic theory instantiated by Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and its introduction of the death drives (notably plural in the original German Todestriebe). We will engage in a close reading of the Freudian text alongside clinical case discussion, exploring how the death drives operate as fundamental dynamics (de)structuring subjective experience. Particular emphasis will be given to the unique rhythm(s) of repetition - traumatic, uncanny, ludic or otherwise. Supplemental readings from Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts will be considered. Participants will be invited to present case material on moments of repetition, impasse, and insistences—or other themes that emerge from our reading. This seminar is designed for clinicians already seeing patients who wish to deepen their engagement with analytic technique and expand their capacity to work with the death drives and repetition in clinical practice. Limited to 8 participants. Readings: Freud, S. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, (1920), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII. Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, (1998), Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. Faculty: Christopher McCann, PhD & Stephen Mosblech, LMFT Dates and times: Third Sunday of the Month: January 2027 – June 2027. 10:00am-12:00pm ET. Location: Virtual (Zoom) Contact: smosblech@proton.me Fee: $100 donation to the school encouraged, none turned away.

We are living in an area of civilization where, as they say, there is free speech, namely that nothing of what you say is of any consequence. You can say anything whatsoever about someone who may well be at the origin of some indicipherable murder or other: you can even create a play about it. The whole of America … crowds into it. Never previously in history would such a thing have been conceivable without the theater being immediately closed. In the land of liberty one can say anything, because this has no consequences… we have even seen psychoanalysts questioning the future of the trade. So Lacan, 1968: The truth is fractured. Me, the truth, I speak …in the two years between these resonant utterances Lacan undertook, as the watershed of May ’68 approached, a search for models that would advance, with the most discrete steps, away from refined or renewed forms of positivism towards what he called exercises of skepticism. This (re)search would take up, he said, the misunderstandings and fragmentary things, still so alive, that tradition has bequeathed to us—not simply as brilliant jugglings between opposed doctrines but as veritable spiritual exercises, corresponding to an ethical praxis, imposed by the clinic. He sought, as do we Lacanians today, a rubric that would give veritable density to the theory that remains to us. This search reached its apotheosis in the forging of a radical ‘algorithm’ that aimed to articulate the logic always at work, between a divided subject and the object cause of desire, in the mixed blood of conscious and unconscious scenarios, originary fantasies, grammatical transformations and infinite substitutions, myths, drives, history.... What does it mean to act psychoanalytically, and what is the logic of the psychoanalytic act? How does acting out inhere in repetition, and how does analytic play diverge from alienation and passage-à-l’acte, where a subject might fall, as Lacan says, off the stage and into the world? We’ll spend the next two years in a close line-by-line reading and discussion of Lacan’s Seminars XIV (1966— ‘67) and XV (1967— ‘68):  The Logic of Phantasy and The Psychoanalytic Act in English translation, alongside French versions of the texts. Online and biweekly, Wednesdays 5—7 pm PT beginning 7 January, 2026. Free-of-charge. Enrollment limited. Please contact Ben Davidson (benjamdavidson@me.com) for more information. Readings: Lacan, J. Seminar Books XIV and XV (Cormac Gallagher, transl). Additional readings as suggested. Faculty: Benjamin Davidson Dates and times: biweekly, Wednesdays 5—7 pm Pacific Time beginning 9 September, 2026. Location: Online Contact: benjamdavidson@me.com Fee: Donation to LSP encouraged, none turned away.

“The Direction of Treatment and the Principles of its Power” is Lacan’s most explicit writing on clinical work where he criticizes his contemporaries for reversing Freud’s direction of treatment. For Lacan, remaining true to Freud would be to begin with what Lacan calls the “rectification of the real,” thereby opening the way for transference and, subsequently, a bold interpretation. Lacan accuses his contemporaries of inverting this direction by starting instead with weak interpretations, waiting for a transference to develop, and then slowly liquidating it through encouraging the analysand’s identification with their reality tested, securely attached ego. Lacan’s polemic is directed specifically against the 1956 collection of articles in La Psychanalyse d’aujourd’hui. While familiarizing ourselves with this background material, we will more vigorously test Lacan’s claims against our own contemporaries. Following Thomos Svolos’s Twenty-First Century Psychoanalysis, we will examine a clinical case of Thomas Ogden. Expanding on Svolos’s analysis with the help of Stijn VanHeule, we will consider from a Lacanian perspective the more general treatment recommendations of Nancy McWilliams and Jonathan Shedler, two key authors of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual. To orient ourselves, each class will begin with a brief review of Lacan’s Graph of Desire drawing on topologies from Lacan’s Seminars IX, X and XI. The floor will then be opened for students to present their own clinical material while working through the week’s reading, focusing especially on selected citations from Lacan. Throughout, we will examine the clinical perils of drawing boundaries between Freud’s alleged standard direction of treatment, its acceptable variations, and its unacceptable deviations. Readings: Lacan, J. “The Direction of Treatment and the Principles of its Powers,” Écrits, (2006). Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton (pp. 489-542). Secondary McWilliams, N and Shedler, J. “Personality Styles and Disorders – P Axis,” (2026). In Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual: (PDM-3), USA: Guilford Press, (pp. 651-708). Ogden, T. “The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts,” Subjects of Analysis, (1994), USA: Jason Aronson Inc. (pp. 61-95). Shedler, J. “Integrating clinical and empirical approaches to personality: The Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure (SWAP),” (2022). In R.E. Feinstein (Ed.), Personality Disorders. Oxford: Oxford University Press (pp. 87-108). Svolos, T. “Introducing the Symptom,” “Introducing the new symptoms,” and “Countertransference is the symptom of the analyst,” Twenty-First Century Psychoanalysis, (2018). New York: Routledge (pp. 71-81, 113-125, 207-220). VanHeule, S. “In between the signifier and the Real: On depressive experiences,” in Lacan on Depression and Melancholia, (2023), Eds. Derek Hook and Stijn VanHeule. New York: Routledge, (pp. 29-40). Faculty: Dr. Gardner Fair Dates and times: the 2nd Saturday of each month, 9 am – 11 am Pacific Time beginning September 12th 2026, skipping October, running through May 2026 Location: Online Contact: gardnerfair@yahoo.com Fee: $200 or School Tuition

This workshop invites participants to collaborate in imagining future psychoanalytic clinics of psychosis. Guided by an ethics that respects speech and understands that results follow from it, we ask: What can be built, and with what tools?    Over the course of fourteen meetings from October through April, we will explore central themes involved in establishing and sustaining clinics of psychosis.    Key areas of focus will include: the roles of geography and place; the forms of collaboration necessary within treatment teams (including questions of metapsychological orientation, training, supervision, and licensure); issues of financial sustainability and clinic structure (individual practice; group practice; hybrid forms); responses to crisis; and questions of autonomy and public-facing work.   Many meetings will feature either guest speakers or roundtable discussions with analysts, clinicians, and researchers currently involved in the development and running of Lacanian and post-Lacanian clinics of psychosis; the other meetings will be devoted to working together with what we have heard and to discussing assigned readings.   Through engaging with guest presentations, roundtable discussions, and readings, workshop participants will work towards their own proposals for a future clinical project, to be presented in the final meetings of the workshop. Prospective participants are asked to reach out to the faculty facilitators at lsppsychosisworkshop@gmail.com with a brief description of their desire and interest to work together on questions related to the creation of a clinic of psychosis. Readings: Cantin, Lucie, Librett, Jeffrey, and Tracy McNulty, editors. A Psychoanalysis for a Reemergent Humanity: The Metapsychology of Willy Apollon. SUNY Press, 2025. Lacan, J. “A Lacanian Psychosis.” Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan, edited by Stuart Schniederman, Yale University Press, 1980, pp. 19-41. Faculty: Bret Fimiani, Richard Reinhardt, and Shanna Carlson de la Torre Dates and times: 1st, 3rd, and 5th Saturdays, October 3, 2026 – April 17, 2027 (except December 19 and January 2), 9am-1130am Pacific Time Location: Online Contact: Garret Barnwell, Bret Fimiani, Richard Reinhardt, and Shanna Carlson de la Torre at lsppsychosisworkshop@gmail.com Fee: $500 or School Tuition

This seminar is a close reading of Moustafa Safouan’s (2004) Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis, which was edited by Anna Shane for Other Press. We will meet over Zoom to collectively read Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis by Moustafa Safouan. Afterwards, we may free associate about what we just read. Readings: Safouan, Moustafa. Four lessons of psychoanalysis. Other Press, 2004. Dates and times: 09/04, 09/11, 09/18, 09/25; 5–7pm Pacific Time. Fee: Donation to the School encouraged. Contact: besharaster@gmail.com.

Following Freud and Lacan, we will consider the dream as a rupture and writing of the unconscious from an Other scene, not as a narrative with a hidden meaning.  The seminar will consider the field of the Other and the place of the analyst in guiding the analysand to hear the rupture of a dream and its signifiers. The seminar will focus on Lacan’s graph of desire as a structuring logic for subject formation as well as a guide for psychoanalytic treatment. Participants will present dreams from their patients/ analysands several times in the course of the seminar.  This is not a case study of the patient, but a case of the-analyst-in training working under constraints of the Lacanian clinic and transference.  Presenters will focus on signifiers as traces of dreams and explain their interventions in the unfolding dream work, following the effects of the interventions over time. Respecting the limits of language and the unknown unsayable that comes with dreams, we will listen to the presenter in the place of the analyst speaking to the logic that is at work in her or his interventions. The aim of the seminar is to develop a series of writings ending with a condensed 10-minute writing that highlights the dream logic. As a condition of joining the seminar, everyone will sign a confidentiality agreement. Limited to 12 participants presenting cases with dreams. This seminar will consist of short lectures, activities and participant presentations. This is writing intensive course and participants will be expected to present from either their case material or the readings each time we meet. Readings: Please read or re-read the following foundational texts prior to our first meeting. Freud, S. (1915-16). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XV: Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Part II). Freud, S. (1933). New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis. The  Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,  Volume XXII (1932-1936): New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, Lecture XXIX Revision of the Theory of Dreams (pages 6-29). Additional readings will be added monthly during the year.  I will continue to draw from Ecrits and Seminar V. Lacan, J. (2007). Ecrits (B. Fink, Trans.). WW Norton. Lacan, J. (1998). Seminar 5-Formations of the unconscious. (R Grigg, Trans.). WW Norton. Dates and times: monthly, September to May, 1st Fridays, 12–2pm Eastern Standard Time. Fee: $500 or School Tuition. Note: CE credits are available for this seminar (2 per meeting). Contact: Diana Cuello, dianacuellophd@gmail.com.

Despite its imaginary aspects, such as reciprocity, mutuality, and symmetry, the notion of intersubjectivity-extensively explored by Edmund Husserl in phenomenology- represents an attempt to grapple with the question of the other for the subject and the nature of otherness in subjective experience. It unveils an alienated dimension within subjectivity that resists complete assimilation into or reduction to a self-centered framework. Lacan situates the fundamental role of speech and language within this field, emphasizing the intersubjective nature of speech and the transindividual character of the unconscious. While Lacan critiques this notion for its ties to the imaginary in the 1960s, he nevertheless maintains that the irreducible dimension of otherness remains crucial. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, otherness is not confined to the structural field of language but is brought into the analytic process through the desire of analysis. It is the analyst’s desire that instills a radical otherness into the analysis, thereby echoing Freud’s assertion that self-analysis is impossible. This seminar, conducted in Chinese, will approach the topic by first engaging with Husserl’s work to examine how the question of the other is articulated. We will then explore Lacan’s writings, which demonstrate that the field of otherness is necessary for the subject—not only experientially and structurally but also logically. Finally, we will focus on the clinical implications of these ideas, particularly the position of the analyst and the role of the analyst’s desire in the analytic process. This Chinese speaking seminar will be grounded in the study of key literature, though dedicated reading time will be limited. The majority of our sessions will consist of my commentary on the texts, accompanied by lectures exploring the central themes and ideas they address. Seminar participants will be encouraged to engage deeply through open-ended discussions. Readings: Lacan, J.  “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” Écrits, (2001). Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton. Lacan, J.  “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty” Écrits, (2006). Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton. Husserl, E. “Fifth Meditation. Uncovering of the Sphere of Transcendental Being as Monadological Intersubjectivity” Cartesian Meditations: an Introduction to Phenomenology, (1982). Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Laplanche, J.  “Transference: its Provocation by the Analyst” Essays on Otherness, (1999). Trans. Luke Thurston. London and New York: Routledge. Neill, C. “Breaking the text: An Introduction to Lacanian discourse analysis.” Theory & Psychology 23.3 (2013): 334-350. Fink, B.  “Desire in Analysis” A clinical introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis: Theory and technique Harvard University Press, 1999. Dates and times: 8:30–11:00am, the fourth Saturday of every month (Beijing Time), September to April; no sessions in February. Fee: 2000 Yuan (RMB) / US $300 or School Tuition. Contact: immanuelliu006@gmail.com.

Introduction to Lacan: Basic Concepts This two-day seminar provides an overview of Lacan’s fundamental theoretical concepts and does not presuppose prior familiarity with Lacanian theory. After providing an overview of Lacan’s life and seminal influences on his work the instructors will introduce the theory of the signifier to explain Lacan’s theory of the unconscious and of desire, and the formation of the subject. A presentation of the registers of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic will serve as background for a review of other seminal concepts, such as Lacan’s view of narcissism, identification, and the drive, as well as the distinctions between pleasure and jouissance. Dates and times: Saturday 31 January 2026 and Saturday 7 February 2026, 10am–12pm Pacific Time. Fee: Donation to the school. Contact: Marcelo Estrada, marcelo.estrada@gmail.com; and Diana Dopchiz de Martin, ddmartinmft@gmail.com.

Introduction to the Big Other: The closing portion of Seminar II In this seminar, we will continue to retrace the signifying chain of Lacan’s early seminar, reading aloud and discussing one lecture therefrom each time we meet. Between sessions, participants will be encouraged to read the texts Lacan cites. By proceeding this way, we will revisit Freud’s writings impacted by the effects of an encounter with the symbolic apparatus of Lacan’s teaching and our own speaking in session. Those who are practicing are invited to share any clinical material that resonates with what emerges in our readings and conversations. We’ll pick up in Seminar II about 2/3 of the way through, where we left off in May 2025. Previous participation is not a requirement to join. All are welcome. Readings: Freud, S. Selections from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. J. Strachey. Lacan, J.  The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 2: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis – 1954-1955, (1991). Trans. S. Tomaselli. WW Norton & Company. Dates and times: 1st and 3rd Tuesday of the month at 8pm EST, September through December 2025. Fee: $150 or School Tuition. Contact: butcher.casey@gmail.com.

Lacanian Clinical Practice, Dream, Symptom, Fantasy:  a Clinical Cases Seminar The logic and experience of this seminar proposes and assumes a methodology and a praxis: our reading of Freud focuses on the ways in which Lacan’s teaching in his seminar and writing in the Écrits transmits a savoir that orients clinical practice insofar as it welcomes the dream, symptom and unconscious formations as they break through as representative of  a censored unconscious.  We begin with the question of how the position of the analyst in Lacanian clinical practice creates a frame for the work of the unconscious as it manifests in the speech of the analysand. As participants in the seminar present their cases, our work will be oriented by moments in which unconscious formations make a rupture in the ego’s discourse, and articulate the position of the subject of the unconscious in relation to desire and jouissance. Readings: Freud, S. (1900).  The Interpretations of Dreams, Volume IV, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Freud, S (1917). “The Sense of the Symptom,” Volume XI, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Lacan, J. (1991).  The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955.  Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli.  New York:  Norton. Lacan, J.  (2006). “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principle of its Power,” Écrits, (2006). Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton. Dates and times: second and fourth Tuesdays of the month, 14 October 2025 through 9 June 2026, 7–8:20pm Pacific Time. Break from December until classes resume January 13; no class April 8; classes resume April 22. Fee: $40 per meeting or School Tuition. Contact: Christopher Meyer, PhD; (323) 930-9662; cmeyerwoeswar@gmail.com.

Lacan Seminars XXIII and XXIV (1975—‘77 ):  On love, unknown knowing and the failure that takes flight … and what now?  What to do when the bindings come undone, and there’s no longer any authority to appeal to?  When the symbolic has floated free of the imaginary and the real, Lacan taught, psychoanalysis provides a mending:  the symptom itself.  Refashioned via our practice, the symptom can itself relink the registers, help them to go on, even when—due to whatever mistakes—there’s no longer anything holding them together. Only the talking cure can fashion a savoir-faire, a know-how or artifice able to endow, as he put it, a remarkable quality to the art of which one is capable.  From the twin poles of the body and language, a real accord; from a babble of tongues, an élan… this art can even, faced with the void of a failed paternity, knot a four-leaf clover out of a broken Trinity. Only our practice—centered on the equivocity of speech, engaging in, to cite Steiner’s words describing the sinthome of James Joyce, collages of word-play, macaronics or acrostics—opens avenues to the understanding and pleasure derived from that tensed imbalance between the expected and the shock of the new which is itself, at its finest, a shock of recognition, a déja vu… only this practice can take us home to that we didn’t know we knew. We’ll spend this year in a close line-by-line reading of Lacan’s Seminars XXIII (1975— ‘76):  The Sinthome and XXIV (1976—’77):  L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre in English translation, alongside French versions of the texts. Sessions consist of reading the seminars aloud for one hour by seminar participants, each consecutive session of Lacan’s seminars corresponding to one meeting, followed by an hour of free association, exploration, analysis and exegesis. Readings: Lacan, J.  The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII:  The Sinthome, (2016).  Trans. A.R. Price.  Cambridge, UK:  Polity. Additional online readings to be assigned. Dates and times: online, biweekly Wednesdays 5–7pm Pacific Time, beginning 7 January 2026. Fee: Free of charge (voluntary donation to LSP encouraged). Contact: benjamdavidson@me.com.

“The goal of my teaching has always been, and remains, to train analysts.” 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. Therefore, we will go through some of Lacan’s writing and seminars, from the early to late Lacan. This year-round seminar is designed to help candidates and precandidates as they traverse their singular journey to becoming a Lacanian-Freudian psychoanalyst. Readings will be announced a month before the start of the seminar. Dates and times: 5:30–8:00pm Pacific Time, last two Thursdays each month, September 2025 to June 2026; no classes in December 2025. Fee: $500 or School Tuition. Contact: Marcelo Estrada, marcelo.estrada@gmail.com.

Reading Lacan’s Seminar Book VIII: Transference In this year’s seminar, we will read Lacan’s Seminar VIII: Transference. At this stage of his work, Lacan’s approach is deeply rooted in structural analysis. Love, desire, and transference are all understood as structures. Transference is one of the most fundamental concepts in psychoanalysis. Wherever there is a subject, there is transference, and this is closely connected to a premise: the subject and the signifier share an “initial,” “inaugural,” and “logical” connection. The signifying chain of the unconscious constructs the speaking subject. Transference lies at the core of the affects between the analyst and the analysand. This is why Lacan begins Transference with “In the Beginning Was Love.” After all, without love, who would like to go into analysis? Analysts are often seen as cold and silent, but this isn’t the whole story. The analyst’s emotional presence is revealed in the cut—the act of cutting, of stopping the subject’s endless sliding along the chain of signifiers. Analysis is a creative act,  and a risky one, since transference can take effect at any moment. We will have a close reading of the seminar together with a free associative open-ended discussion. Readings: Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VIII: Transference. Trans. Bruce Fink. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015. Dates and times: 8:30–11:00am, second and fourth Wednesdays each month, September to May (Beijing time, break in December and February). Fee: US $400 or School Tuition. Contact: celavieglove@126.com; cissyhongzhou@126.com.

In this seminar, we will continue to retrace the signifying chain of Lacan’s early seminar, reading aloud and discussing one lecture therefrom each time we meet. Between sessions, participants will be encouraged to read the texts Lacan cites. By proceeding this way, we will revisit Freud’s writings impacted by the effects of an encounter with the symbolic apparatus of Lacan’s teaching and our own speaking in session. Those who are practicing are invited to share any clinical material that resonates with what emerges in our readings and conversations. All are welcome. Readings: Freud, S. Selections from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. J. Strachey. Lacan, J.  The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 3: The Psychoses – 1955-1956, (1993). Trans. R. Grigg. WW Norton & Company. Schreber, D.P. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Trans. I. Macalpine & R. A. Hunter. New York Review of Books. Dates and times: 1st and 3rd Tuesday of the month at 8:00pm EST, January through May 2026. Fee: $150 or School Tuition. Contact: butcher.casey@gmail.com.

The work of the letter in psychoanalysis:  Freud’s letters, Lacan’s return to Freud, speech and writing in the clinic and School of psychoanalysis This seminar explores the centrality of the letter in the history and experience of psychoanalysis as a rupture in the episteme of the speaking-being.  A consideration of the letter takes us to the heart of  what is at stake in the transmission  of a  subject’s truth and knowledge as regards the unconscious.  As we read Freud’s early letters to Wilhelm Fliess we witness a sustained correspondence and even a working through of an imaginary transference for Freud.  Even as Freud undergoes his disillusionment of this transference, these letters establish an address for Freud that concerns his discovery of a censored as well as a repressed unconscious.  And the address will be sustained throughout the remainder of his written work, or what we now refer to as Freud’s Standard edition. The seminar argues that Freud’s address will await Lacan’s return address, his return to Freud, to restore the practice of the letter as one of an inscription that repeats and insists in the life of the subject who is represented by and through the signifier.  Lacan’s return to Freud results in a move from the man of letters, or the transmission of psychoanalysis through the question of the written and what can be written about it, to a consideration of the letters of the body as inscriptions of the Real, of jouissance, that select signifiers representing a subject to a Real unconscious. The seminar takes the form of a lecture and reading group format.  Participants will also be asked to take up an epistolary correspondence with a fellow seminar participant as we make our way throughout the year as a way of engaging in a written record of what arises over the course of its experience. Readings: Certeau, Michel de. (2000).  “Lacan:  an ethics of speech,” Heterologies:  discourse on the other.   Trans., Marie-Rose Logan, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Freud, S. (1995).  The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904.  Translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press. Freud, S. Selections from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. J. Strachey. Lacan, J. (2006). “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud,” Écrits. (2006).  Trans. Bruce Fink, New York:  Norton. Lacan, J.  Selections from the Seminars of Jacques Lacan,  Seminars XX, Encore, and Seminar XXI, Les Non-dupes Errent, 1973-1974.  Trans. C. Gallagher Lacan, J. (1990).  “Founding Act,” in Television, A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment.  Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson.  New York:  Norton. Lacan, J. (1990).  “Letter of Dissolution,” in Television, A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment.  Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson.  New York:  Norton. Lacan, J. (1990).  “The Other is Missing,” in Television, A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment.  Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson.  New York:  Norton. Dates and times: every 4th Saturday of the month except December, 27 September 2025 through 27 June 2026, 10am–12 noon Pacific Standard Time. Fee: $60 per session / $40 students, or School Tuition. Contact: Christopher Meyer, PhD; (323) 930-9662; cmeyerwoeswar@gmail.com.