This seminar will be the most “clinical” of the seminars in the Lacan Guided Reading Group yet. In it we will read a Lacanian text that is zealously addressed to clinicians situated at the intersection between ego-psychology, object-relation theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. We will address the centrality of the unconscious (structured like a language) in the analytic situation, the importance of the Symbolic in the experience of the subject, and its unfolding in speech, the role of desire and, more specifically, the “desire of the analyst” in the direction of the treatment.

More often than not, we seem to have trouble starting out, and sticking with a discipline of writing as a practice. In this Writing Day, we will not approach this challenge theoretically. Rather than talk about how hard it can be to write, we will actually do it, using effective methods that set the flow of the act itself in motion.
 

Starting with a brief history of the use of LSD in therapy, from the psychotomimetic speculations of its manufacturer to the debate over psycholytic vs. psychedelic doses to the moratorium on research, and the current reemergence of clinical trials, this historical overview will be followed by a diachronic survey of the clinical conditions that appear to respond favorably to psychedelics (depression, addiction, anxiety, eating disorders etc.).

In this talk we will take a historical approach to the act of breathing, and follow the breath, “whatever it does,” through the various ways body and mind have been imagined across psychoanalytic theories. From the “hysterical coughing” of the first patient of psychoanalysis, Anna O., to Freud’s analysis of the Wolf Man’s exhalations, to his broken intimacy with otolaryngologist Wilhelm Fliess (with whom he frequently discussed the nose and sexuality), to name just a few examples, breath will be the main protagonist of this special presentation.