Theoretical Seminars

Psychoanalysis, Philosophy & Theology

Convenor: David Pereira, Analyst of the School
Ph. (03) 9690 3515 | ✉ email enquiry

First Saturday of the month 10.30am - 12.00pm

An appraisal of certain fundamental concepts in psychoanalysis and the way in which they are informed by and inform recurring questions in philosophy and theology across the realms of metaphysics, ontology, logic and ethics

The Child, the Adult, and the Subject of Psychoanalysis

Convenors: Michael Gerard Plastow, Analyst of the School
Ph. (03) 9347 1486 | ✉ email enquiry

First Tuesday of each month (generally) 8 – 9.30pm, from Tuesday 7th March 2023

The patient who attends the consulting room, whether a child or an adult—and the child is inevitably accompanied by an adult—is not yet a psychoanalytic subject. He or she is a person, whose etymology is literally the mask worn in antiquity by actors to represent a character. Thus the person is the imaginary double of the subject, a false being whose function is to mask its very division. The subject in psychoanalysis can only emerge through an act of speech that, very specifically, underlines the discontinuity of such an imaginary being. The subject that emerges may then be able to leave his or her own mark. This seminar endeavours to grapple with the developmental beings of the child, adolescent, and adult, in order to disentangle from them, the psychoanalytic subject.

In 2023 we will again take up Sabina Spielrein’s itinerary of writing, this year her move from Lausanne to Geneva, via The Hague. We will examine her papers from this time, including her encounter with pedagogy and cognitive psychology at the Rousseau Institute. We will also discuss this in the light of Lacan’s later propositions that resonate with many of Spielrein’s ideas. We will see that Spielrein does not make a theoretical division between her work with children and adults, but her concern is that of the subject of psychoanalysis, as Lacan would later call it. Here we can also endeavour to disentangle the history of psychoanalysis from its cause.

This seminar welcomes those of any stage of interest, or formation, in psychoanalysis. Participants will have the opportunity to speak of their own clinical practice and their readings of texts.

My Barbaric Yawp

Convenor: Peter Gunn, Analyst Member of the School
Ph. (03) 9347 1707 | ✉ email enquiry

Second Monday of the month 7.00pm – 9.00pm, commencing March 14, 2023

In what condition, in what determinism, can death, the signifier, spring fully armed into treatment? This can be understood only by our way of articulating the relations. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

This Seminar is concerned with the symbiosis between writing and love and what this implies for the practice of psychoanalysis. This year, recognising that for psychoanalysis writing is the enactment of the materiality of the signifier, this will be articulated with a third: death.

Love, taken as sign, is not to be understood. Yet it is to this death-in-life symbiosis that we must constantly submit ourselves if there is to be an art practice which we can call psychoanalysis. To draw over the writing of Barbara Guest, for both the poet and the artisan-psychoanalyst, “dreams [are] [be]set by typography.”

The Seminar is structured around presentations which draw on the material practice of artists, in any field, including that of the presenters themselves. Each one, caught up in their own peculiar way in this symbiosis between love-death and writing, brings this psychoanalytic seminar to life.

In Consideration of Anguish

Convenors: Megan Williams, Analyst of the School | Ph. 0417728738 | ✉ email enquiry
Tine Nørregaard, Analyst Member of the School | Ph. 0419150658 | ✉ email enquiry

The seminar will take place in Geelong on the second Monday of every month, from 7.00-8.30pm, commencing on Monday February 13.

Could anxiety be the Toyota Camry of our days, as an interviewee on Radio National suggested—that is, the near-ubiquitous accom-paniment of everyday life? Could anxiety even be an affect that guides us—or a signal, and if so, what does it alert us to?

This seminar commenced in 2021 and will continue to elaborate on and consider anxiety in another way than by regarding it as an ill-ness or a disorder. We will use the tenth seminar of Jacques Lacan, entitled Anguish, as a framework for our considerations, as well as other texts and matters raised in the clinic. It is through this seminar that Lacan traces an approach to the object concerned in sexuality, and thereby invents his notion of a new kind of object, the object a.

To attend the seminar or for further information, please contact one of the convenors.

Reading Seminars

These Seminars involve a close reading of foundational texts of Freud and Lacan with discussion of related clinical and theoretical topics.

The Lacan Reading Seminar: Seminar VIII Transference

Convenor: Linda Clifton, Analyst of the School
Ph. (+61) 0421 979 496 | E. ✉ email enquiry

Last Saturday of the month 3.00pm – 5.00 pm

The Seminar of the School

Foundations of Psychoanalysis

Convenor: Harry Constantinou
Wednesdays 7.30pm – 9.00pm

Download 2023 Seminar Programme
Year 4: Praxis and the Formation of Analysts

Commencing Wednesday 1st March and running for 20 weeks, the Foundations of Psychoanalysis seminar returns in 2023 to provide participants with a rigorous working of the fundamental concepts underpinning Freudian and Lacanian theory and clinical practice. It forms an important component of the theoretical aspect of the training of analysts and the ongoing work of the analysts of the school.

The Seminar is also open to students, scholars and colleagues in related clinical fields, in recognition of the importance to psychoanalysis of its extension beyond the clinic.

Harry Constantinou
P: (+61) 0434 922 143
✉ Send email

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The Seminar of the School

Convenor: Harry Constantinou
First Saturday of the Month
12.00pm to 1.30pm

The Seminar of the School is held monthly and open to members of The Freudian School of Melbourne. Those from outside the School wishing to participate in the theoretical interrogation of Lacanian psychoanalysis are welcome to enquire about the School's Foundations of Psychoanalysis Seminar.