The School, gathered in one map

Palimpsest, from the Greek palimpsestos, “rubbed again”, names a parchment or tablet “written upon or inscribed two or three times, the previous text or texts having been imperfectly erased and still remaining partly visible.”

The School takes the palimpsest as a founding genre: both of its founding papers bear the name, André Patsalides’s Palimpseste and Adler’s Palimpsest: Viewing the Unconscious from Another Time and Place, each written in 1992. Patsalides calls the palimpsest a work-text: a draft imposed on prior texts that must be reworked and interpreted, clarifying one’s imaginary position toward the text, assuming responsibility for transforming what is written, and enacting the subjective position that transformation produces. What is at stake, he writes, “is not merely a change in the edition of a text, but rather an effective positioning of oneself in regards to the foundation of the School.”

To write a palimpsest, then, is to read Freud and Lacan as themselves palimpsests, texts a century old, overlaid by later misreadings and translations, their earlier layers still showing through, and, in reworking them, to take up a position of one’s own within the School’s ongoing work. In a member’s formation, the palimpsest marks the step from Precandidate to Candidate, on either track, and is the moment the precandidate joins the School: the advisor brings the precandidate’s desire before the Meeting of the Analysts, and the precandidate presents the palimpsest at the next Days of Assembly.

A passage is the advancement of a Candidate Analyst to Analyst of the School, the analyst-track counterpart to the Scholar’s Traversée. It follows the palimpsest, which marked the earlier step from Precandidate to Candidate.

Like the palimpsest, the passage turns on desire and is recognized by the assembled School: the advisor brings the candidate’s desire before the Meeting of the Analysts, and the candidate is then scheduled to present the Passage at the next Days of Assembly. What is at stake is not a credential conferred from outside but a position arrived at and attested.

A traversée is the advancement of a Candidate Scholar to Scholar of the School, the scholar-track counterpart to the analyst’s Passage. Its name marks the traversal the School’s Scholar-formation founding text calls “foundational to the Scholar of the School”: from the split subject of the unconscious to the objet petit a, the remainder at the end of analysis.

The path is long. After the palimpsest, the new Candidate Scholar undertakes a singular Scholar Project, “a gift to the School”, sustained over four years, often in a project cartel. When they have brought their analysis to its logical end and are ready to speak about that project, they may request a Traversée presentation to the assembled School, and so become a Scholar of the School. The Scholar-formation founding text was written by Annie Rogers and Marcelo Estrada in 2022.

The training analysis is the personal analysis a candidate undertakes with an analyst of their own choosing. It is the central experience of psychoanalytic formation: one becomes an analyst first by having been, at length, an analysand. The School does not direct or oversee this analysis; it belongs to the candidate alone.

A control analysis, elsewhere called supervision, is the regular presentation of one’s clinical work to a more experienced analyst. The candidate brings the conduct of a case under discussion and, in doing so, learns to read the direction of a treatment. It accompanies the training analysis through the years of formation.

Each member in formation has an advisor who accompanies their path through the School. They meet at least once a year, an annual meeting is required, and as often beyond that as the work calls for. The advisor helps situate a member’s analysis, study, and participation, and presents the steps of their formation to the School, a point of contact between the singular trajectory of one member and the common life of the community.

Seminars are the School’s teaching at its center: courses, often year-long, in which faculty read Freud and Lacan closely. Many are open to the public, with no prior background assumed. The seminar is where the transmission of psychoanalysis becomes a shared, public work.

A cartel is a small group, traditionally four members, plus a “plus-one” who provokes and sustains the work, formed around a shared question. It is Lacan’s device for studying without a master: each member pursues their own product, accountable to the group rather than to a teacher. After a time the cartel dissolves, and its members permute into new ones.

Reading groups gather members and friends of the School around a text or theme, at a slower and more open pace than the seminar. They are a common point of entry into the School’s work, and a place where a close reading can unfold over many meetings.

The Days of Assembly gather the whole School. They are an occasion for the community to convene, to present work, to deliberate on the questions facing the School, and to renew the common life that the seminars and cartels carry between such gatherings. It is here that members in formation present their palimpsests, passages, and traversées.

A Working Day is a day given over to sustained collective work on a single question. Members present and discuss their research before the School, working a problem together over the course of the day rather than across a term.

The Board of Directors carries the administrative direction of the School, its governance, its finances, and its continuity. Following the School’s founding principle, it is composed of the School’s own members, who share the work of its direction rather than delegating it to an outside authority.

The Meeting of the Analysts is the body of the School’s analysts, convened to deliberate on questions of formation, including admission to the School and the recognition of the passages and traversées by which its members advance. It attends to what cannot be reduced to administration: the work of formation itself.

The Program Committee shapes the School’s teaching. It solicits and reviews proposals for seminars and special events, reviews and approves cartels as members propose them, and assembles the program offered each year, holding open the question of what, in a given moment, the School most needs to read and to think.

A working group takes up a defined task on behalf of the School itself, its functioning and common life rather than the work of formation. Where seminars and cartels are where formation happens, a working group serves the School as an institution: an inquiry, a publication, an event, worked at until the task is done. Unlike a cartel, which turns on each member’s own product, it is organized around a shared aim and dissolves once that aim is met.