Occupy Psychoanalysis

03/20/2022

For years I have been monitoring online or in presence supervisory groups formed by Russian psychoanalysts, who live and practice in various cities, including outside Russia. These are dear friends as well as colleagues who closely follow Western psychoanalysis, especially French, and many of them c...

10/09/2019

We have reached 2k likes. Thanks everybody! OP will resume posting shortly. Here is a short snippet from Roudinesco's biography:

"Lacan once told Catherine Millot what he thought of his analysis. In his opinion Loewenstein was not intelligent enough to analyze him. Cruel but true! It was in his own Seminar, said Lacan, that he felt he was really analyzed (he never recognized the fundamental role Marguerite had played in this respect). To illustrate the situation between him and Loewenstein, Lacan told Catherine Millot of an incident that occurred at the time. One day he was driving his little car through a tunnel when a truck came at him headon from the opposite direction. He decided to keep going, and the truck gave way. He told Loewenstein what had happened, hoping to make him see the truth about their transferential relationship. But he got no answer."

So let us not be afraid of their huge trucks in our small cars, but join our efforts to overcome the reaction!

10/18/2018

Still true

"After Freud's death in 1939, some of his students also claimed to be exercising a different kind of psychoanalysis by reducing his teachings to a few banal formulas: technique as a ritual, practice restricted to treating people’s behaviour, as a means of re-adapting the individual to his social environment. This is the negation of Freud: a comforting salon psychoanalysis.

He had predicted it himself. He said that there were three untenable positions, three impossible tasks: governing, educating, and exercising psychoanalysis. These days it doesn’t much matter who takes the responsibility for governing, and everyone claims to be an educator. As for psychoanalysts, thank God, they are prospering as experts and as quacks. To offer to help people means guaranteeing success, and the customers are banging down the door. Psychoanalysis is something quite different to this."

Jacques Lacan, interviewed in 1974

08/27/2017

Vakhtang Gomelauri, LCSW, the creator of Occupy Psychoanalysis, interviewed by Zero Books on the topic of Lacan's Television

Vakhtang Gomelauri is a therapist and self-proclaimed psychoanalyst working in NYC who is influenced by the ideas of the Jacques Lacan and this week he’s stopped by to discuss the book Television by Jacques Lacan, and the televised broadcast that the book is based on. If you’re looking for a book to...

04/12/2017

"To authorize oneself (s'authoriser) is not to auto-ri(tuali)ze oneself. For I have moreover posed that the analyst arises from the not-all. Not-all beings to speak would know how to authorize themselves to become analysts.
The proof is that an analysis is necessary there, yet it is not sufficient. Only the analyst--not just anyone, that is--is only authorized by himself."
Excerpt from Note to the Italians, April 1974. Translated by Jack Stone. Via Richard G. Klein

03/30/2017

The question is to put oneself in a position where there is someone whom you have taken charge of with respect to his anxiety, who wishes to come and hold the same position that you occupy, or that you do not occupy, or that you barely occupy, who wishes to come to know how you occupy it, and how you do not occupy it, and why you occupy it, and why you do not occupy it. - Lacan

03/23/2017

On this day in 1973, the Mental Patients Union was founded in London by a small group of mental health patients and supporters. They argued that psychiatry was a form of control of the working class under capitalism, and so in the same way that workers organised themselves, so too must mental health patients. More info here: https://libcom.org/history/mental-patients-union-1973
Shout out to our friends at Past Tense who compiled this

02/06/2017

But then what about the proles?

02/05/2017

In memoriam

10/17/2016

Occupy Psychoanalysis fully supports the proposal for impossible schools of psychoanalysis worldwide!

English subtitles by Alma Buholzer. - Ideology and the four discourses - Death drive and desire - For an an impossible school of psychoanalysis - the analyst...

09/29/2016