International of Forums
School of Psychoanalysis of the Forums of the Lacanian Field

The School of Psychoanalysis  

Introduction

History

Since their creation in 1998, following the split that came about in the AMP (World Association of Psychoanalysis), the Forums of the Lacanian Field have envisaged the creation of a School of Psychoanalysis that would return to the aims inscribed in the foundational acts of the School of Jacques Lacan. The School of psychoanalysis of the Forums of the Lacanian Field (EPFCL) was created at the time of the International Meeting of December 2001, after two years of a long debate regarding its organization. International in scope, it provides a guarantee, equally international, via the titles Analyst Member of the School (AME) for practitioners; and Analyst of the School for those who have successfully traversed the pass.

Why a School?

In a School of psychoanalysis, not of psychoanalysts, the first objective is less to assemble professionals than to make it possible for analysts to have a unique social link, based on the study and treatment of problems raised by analytic practice itself, notably the analysis of the analyst, the formation of practitioners, and the transmission of analytic discourse.

The major mechanisms in the service of this goal are the Cartel and the procedure of the pass. (see these headings.)

The necessity for a School-as distinct from the multiple groups and associations-rests on the aporia of the analytic act itself. Neither a specialist's technique nor an artisan's know-how, not without connection to knowledge, but excluding a reporting, it is approached only by the conditions that make it possible-the production in the analyst of a specific desire-"the desire of the analyst"-which is not attested to except indirectly, through its effects in the analyses themselves.

In the School, it is therefore the analyst who is in the driver's seat. Neither scientist, nor artist, he maintains himself in his desire only by the questioning that a school is formed to support, so that he can speak about what he makes of his experience and how he manages to resist in the the daily routine of his practice.

« The Position of the School of the Lacanian Field »

February 2016

The law on homosexual unions was passed in France at the beginning of 2015. The Cirinnà law on the same subject is currently being debated in Italy. The Church itself has called a synod on the family and we know the anxieties raised and the debates that foment opinion on this subject.

Psychoanalysts are obviously concerned and are being questioned. In recent times we have seen them give various, and often opposed, opinions. They can only do so on a personal level of course for who could claim to represent Psychoanalysis? This diversity is sufficient reason for a School like the international SPFLF of the Lacanian field to make its own position known:

That psychoanalysis is intrinsically bound to the democratic state of society and the respect for the equal rights of all citizens, without consideration of race or sex, is an a priori of psychoanalytic practice.

Moreover, from Freud to Lacan, the principal position of the psychoanalyst is clear: he does not work for any norm, whether social or sexual. Neither censor nor militant, he is employed in analysing the symptoms from which subjects suffer and which they would like to have elucidated.

Thus it is completely out of the question that anyone could oppose the rights of homosexual subjects in the name of our School. Let us recall Freud's categorical position on this point in a footnote added to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1915: « Psychoanalytic research is most decidedly opposed to any attempt at separating off homosexuals from the rest of mankind as a group of a special character » (Freud 1905, SE vol. VII, p.145).

Reference texts

The School's orientation is defined by Jacques Lacan’s founding texts: