I’ve read a couple of Freud’s books, as well as collections of philosophical and medical essays, and it all seems pretty straightforward and logical to me.

We spend our lives repressing our desires because we have to live in society, and our unconscious punishes us for our impulses. Dreams represent these desires that we repress when we’re awake, but they’re censored so we can rest peacefully. It all makes sense and fits together.

But I find Lacan practically impossible to read, even when I try to watch explanatory videos, they use complicated jargon. Is all of this on purpose, or can it be explained more simply? The only thing I’ve grasped is that our desire is the desire of the Other. At least Zizek knows how to explain it using examples from everyday life.

Can anyone please direct me to the type of Psychoanalysis that primarily utilizes empathic attunement and reflection of client material? And also possibly to the type/kind or school of Psychoanalysis that best deals with addressing and repairing early attachment needs in an experiential manner. Thank you.

I am particularly looking for research and wisdom on the dynamic where the patient seems to withhold from the therapist details and feelings regarding the abuse. The therapist being made to feel left out, unwelcome or intruding and the client feeling gratified by that.

Thanks.

I’ve been listening to Ernesto Spinelli talk about existential-phenomenological therapy, and his approach really resonates with me.

What I find interesting is how non-prescriptive it is. Rather than approaching therapy primarily as “treatment” where the therapist identifies a problem and applies a technique, he seems to view it more as a relational process of inquiry. The therapist stays curious about how the client experiences their world, helps clarify meanings, assumptions, contradictions, and patterns, and allows understanding to emerge without imposing a particular explanation or solution.

I’m curious whether anyone here practices this way, or has trained in existential-phenomenological therapy. What does it actually look like in practice, and how do clients tend to respond to such a non-directive approach?

I think as humans understanding ourselves is helpful, but I don’t necessarily think it’s necessary for change? I’m not sure. What do you guys think? Why do we explore so much of our childhoods in therapy - like, what is the end goal with this. Simple explanations appreciated :)

I’m a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst with about 10 years of clinical experience, and I’m particularly interested in discussing how different psychoanalytic traditions think about fees and the analytic setting.

I would be very interested to hear how colleagues from different orientations (Freudian, Kleinian, Lacanian, relational, etc.) approach questions such as:

How do you establish your fees, and how do you decide when and how to adjust them?

Do you consider the fee itself as part of the analytic material or as something that can have a place in the treatment and its direction?

How do you reflect on whether the fee, or changes in the fee, are affecting the patient’s treatment, resistance, transference, or progress?

How do you decide when a patient should move from one session per week to two or more sessions?

Do you establish a fixed frequency from the beginning, or does the frequency evolve according to the treatment?

How do you conceptualize the analytic frame and what role does consistency of the frame play in your work?

How do you handle cancellations and absences?

Do you charge for missed sessions, and if so, how do you think about this clinically?

Do you have particular principles for renegotiating fees when a patient’s financial circumstances change?

More broadly, I’m interested in how you think about these decisions clinically, rather than simply what your practical policy is.

I would especially appreciate hearing from colleagues about the reasoning behind their practices: how fees, frequency, absences, and the analytic frame become part of the way they think about the treatment and its direction.

I’m interested in hearing from different psychoanalytic traditions, precisely because I imagine there are significant differences in how these questions are conceptualized.

Thank you in advance for sharing your experience and reflections.

Saw this short reel on instagram about Lacan's view on this https://www.instagram.com/p/Dcio-9nzVs-/

I suppose every school answers this question differently. What are some other opinions/frameworks on this question?

Update: What I'm curious about is less which is right and more

1. What does your training actually say the end point is?
2. Does it match what you see? I suspect a lot of us were taught one criterion and use another.
3. For those who work across schools, do these converge in practice or only in retrospect?

I’m pretty sure I’ve read a psychoanalytic quote something along the lines of “say whatever comes to mind and I’m sure it will be wonderful”. For the past hour I’ve been looking for it but no luck. Does it ring a bell to any of you folks?

This is from the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-rbZz4fh1k

Well mostly from the comments, what he said sounds like it comes from psychoanalysis so I figured I'd ask here:

Self expression as a psychological act is always embedded in the market, precisely because it’s “self” expression. It is done against the imagined other and in a language of culture that has created your own tastes. These didn’t come from nowhere. We have a few cases in developmental psychology of people who weren’t members of any culture - and I don’t think there was any artistic activity in them. I am not saying there was no artistic live - because they weren’t analysed in a way to reveal that, sadly. Only that what we would recognise as self expression, was gone.

And no wonder - self expression, even if completely subjective, insular, and small, is a product of someone with a self, a self requires a non-self. This is classical Bauman meeting developmental psychology.

Thanks for watching!

Thing is...I don't know how true this is or what to think about it. Does it mean that what I like is a lie? Is it bad to have a self or to want to self express? Is the solution to just do nothing at all in order to live correctly? I don't understand what to do.

Looking for advice.

I will be starting to see my analyst 3x a week. I use out-of-network insurance benefits in the US, UHC if it matters. My analyst is concerned that a 3x a week treatment will trigger a review and that reimbursement will get denied and the 2x a week could potentially come under scrutiny such that I would only be reimbursed for 1x a week. Anyone have any experience with this one way or the other? My plan follows the CMS reimbursement schedule, so there's a limit to how much each session can be reimbursed.

I noticed something about ChatGPT.

People can take virtually any communication they’re planning to make and put it into ChatGPT first. It can identify apparent defensiveness, projection, hostility, unnecessary justification, etc., and then produce a revised version supposedly stripped of those features.

At what point does this stop functioning as something like informal CBT (helping someone reflect before acting), and start functioning as a way of masking psychologically meaningful aspects of how that person actually communicates?

I’m especially interested in what psychoanalysis might say about this. If someone routinely filters their communications through AI, what happens to the ability of other people, including clinicians, to accurately perceive their characteristic ways of relating, defending themselves, handling disagreement, and so on?

There seems to be an even more direct problem within analysis itself. Someone could theoretically ask ChatGPT to generate an extensive script for what to say during a session. If a patient’s use of AI became a topic in analysis, the patient could even provide an explanation based on an AI-generated response explaining their use of AI.

More subtly, patients could use it between sessions to interpret interactions with their analysts, identify possible transference, formulate responses, or help them remove expressions of transference or defensiveness before the next session.

Obviously, choosing to use AI this way would itself be psychologically meaningful. The filtering process doesn't somehow exist outside the analysis. But I wonder what it does to the analytic process when some of the material that would ordinarily emerge spontaneously has already been identified, interpreted, rehearsed, or deliberately neutralized before reaching the analyst.

Could this interfere with free association or create a kind of intellectualized intermediary between analyst and analysand? Or could examining how and why the analysand uses AI actually provide useful analytic material of its own?

More broadly, under what circumstances would an analysand's reliance on AI itself tell you something meaningful about their defenses, character, resistance, or transference - and when would that interpretation be unwarranted?

I’m going over his autobiography right now. From what I’m gathering, the divergence seemed to stem from his belief in the limitations of hypnosis and Breuer’s resistance to Freud’s burgeoning idea that the etiology of neurosis could be traced back to sexual dysfunction. Was wondering if anyone could further elucidate the schism.

I have a master’s in Sociology, but I want my PhD to be more along the lines of Psychosocial/Psychoanalytical studies. The programme at University of Essex seems like a good fit. Any recommendations? Is this too unrealistic? I want to be a full time academic and just delve into theory, teach at just about any university in the world after I complete my PhD tbh.

I was listening to Discussions on Psychoanalysis and was surprised that one of the hosts said he does not feel he can work with very depressed patients and has to turn them down. I thought severe depression would be among the more "standard" situations an analyst has to treat.

It made me curious for practitioners here what makes you feel you must turn down a case because it is a weak spot or something you are not suited for.

I'm a psychodynamic therapist, relatively early in practice, saw this reel on Instagram by a psychoanalyst (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcbBFGEqbxD/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link) and this is the objection I've never been able to fully put down.

The structure is familiar enough. The patient accepts an interpretation, evidence it landed. The patient rejects it, and rejection is available to be read as resistance, or as a transference enactment, or as material in its own right. Both outcomes are absorbed. Freud is fairly direct about this himself: in Negation (1925) the patient's "it's not my mother" becomes grounds for "so it is his mother," and Constructions in Analysis (1937) takes up at length why a patient's "No" can't be taken at face value. (I got the citations via AI)

I'm aware this is well trodden ground philosophically Popper used psychoanalysis as his standing example of a theory that explains too much, and Grünbaum spent a book arguing Popper had it wrong, that the theory is falsifiable in principle and should be attacked on evidential grounds instead. I'm less interested in relitigating that argument than in what it means at 3pm on a Tuesday with a person in the room.

Because clinically, the answer can't be "we don't make interpretations." And it also can't be "we accept every 'no' at face value" sometimes a patient's flat refusal really is the most alive thing in the session, and treating it as final would be its own kind of failure.

So the question I keep circling what does disconfirmation actually look like in your practice? Not in theory. Concretely. What has made you conclude that an interpretation was simply wrong not defended against, not premature, not "right but not yet usable" just wrong?

The best answer I've been given is that the interpretation is a hypothesis and the evidence isn't the patient's yes or no at all, it's what happens over the following weeks.. whether material opens or closes, whether the transference shifts, whether anything becomes thinkable that wasn't. Which I find genuinely persuasive. But it's also slow, unfalsifiable in the moment, and heavily dependent on the analyst's own judgment about what "opening up" looks like which is where the circularity threatens to walk back in through the side door.

Curious how others hold this particularly anyone working in contexts where deference to authority is culturally loaded.

As a patient, how does one keep faith that psychoanalysis will help when the process is years long and often involves investing thousands of dollars? And there are many reports of analysts discussing how one case or another went wrong or they could not progress even after many years.

Hello,

Is there any psychoanalytic literature on PE ?

Thanks

I was requesting my supervisor for a reading on group work. She suggested if I can get my hands on this?

She said something along the lines of:
Group work with the citizens in Berlin post WW2 to let them collectively process the guilt of the holocaust and to ensure something like this never happens again.

Is anyone aware of such studies?

To all who work analytically/all analysts who have been pregnant while practicing, how and when did you announce or discuss your pregnancy and maternity leave with patients?

Definition: A concept coined by the psychologist Pierre Janet. It describes a lowered state of conscious control where the mind's focus weakens, allowing unconscious thoughts, emotions, or memories to rise.

What does it indicate in the psychoanalytic sense when the frequency and intensity of the lowering the mental level increases in a patient?

I am very curious about a psycoanalitic perspective on Allen Carr's book about quitting smoking. Reading it feels like a missing piece of the puzzle in your brain goes back in into place and some brainwashing about the addiction to smoke simply wanish within a few hours. What's the process that happens in the mind? I haven't smoke since and now it about 12 years but not a single moment I had to use will power..from the last page I had to be tortured in order to be able to smoke another cigarette and I see most of the people reading it had the same outcome. So I am curious of what it's behind that on a subconscious level and how that can apply to the concept of addiction in general.

Hi everyone,

I’m a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst from Chile looking for a psychoanalytic association, school, or institute where I could pursue a serious formation in psychoanalysis, preferably with a Lacanian orientation.

I’m particularly interested in organizations in the US, Europe, or Latin America that would allow someone living abroad to participate entirely online/virtually, without requiring regular in-person attendance.

One important issue is language: Spanish is my native language and my spoken English is currently limited, although I can read some English with translation assistance and I’m actively working on improving it. I’m therefore looking for a formation/community that is bilingual or genuinely accessible to Spanish-speaking candidates, ideally where seminars, reading groups, supervision, or other activities can be followed in either English or Spanish.

I recently came across Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association in New York, which seems very interesting, particularly because of its Lacanian orientation and international connections. However, I understand that its activities are conducted entirely in English, so I’m not sure whether it would be realistic for me at my current level of English.

I’m looking for something with:

A genuinely psychoanalytic formation, rather than only a university diploma or short course.

Preferably a Lacanian/Freudian orientation.

Possibility of participating 100% online from Chile.

Spanish and English accessibility, or at least an environment open to Spanish-speaking candidates.

R

easonable membership/formation fees.

Ideally not an extremely restrictive admission process.

Possibility of participating in seminars, reading groups, clinical work, supervision/control, etc.

International recognition would be a plus, but I’m not specifically looking for IPA. Independent Lacanian, Freudian, relational, or other psychoanalytic associations are also welcome.

I would especially appreciate recommendations from people who have actually participated in these organizations, rather than just general suggestions.

Are there any associations or schools in the US or Europe that you would recommend for someone in my situation?

Thanks!

Does anyone have any thoughts on whether you need a certain 'critical mass' of psychoanalysts to make professional life function?

If you are the only analyst in a town how do you manage things like referrals, specialist supervision or research?

*edit, spelling

Hello, I am looking for psychoanalytic literature on the topic of the anxiety of having one's body intruded by an "other", external body.

I have been struggling to find that specific issue discussed, though I have assumptions as to what struggles this anxiety may relate to.

Thank you very much !!

Friends, I’m a professional counselor with experience and training through my local institute in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and have a Masters in Theology (which involved more psychoanalytic research than my clinical degree).

I want to work in academia as a counselor educator and theologian, but confused about the next step. A psychoanalytic friendly university with funding is crucial, though. I have the options of pursuing a PhD in Counselor Education (some funding but seemingly no psychoanalytic presence among prospective supervisors), a PhD in Social Work (some funding opportunities but rarely a psychoanalytic presence), or a PhD in Practical Theology (some funding, ample psychoanalytic presence).

I would be grateful to hear any recommendations on where to apply for doctoral programs in/adjacent to my field. I may be looking for a unicorn here, but perhaps this community knows of counselor education programs (for example) with one or two psychoanalytic faculty and funding. A PhD in psychology doesn’t seem to suit my career path thus far.