Summer Term: The Unconscious

Dates: 6th and 20th June, 4th and 18th July, and a final session TBC.

The first four sessions will be faciliated by Tamara Dellutri culminating in a fifth seminar of questions with Luis Izcovich.

Course price: £120

For trainees, students and those on low-income we have a concession price of £60

Introductory Lectures: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

Dr Luis Izcovich & Ms Tamara Dellutri

In the text 'British Psychiatry and the War: 1947' the French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan notes his appreciation of the particularities of British psychiatry during a visit to the UK. In this talk, Lacan observes the effects that the war has produced on British psychiatric wards, where under the presumed effectiveness of the English utilitarian approach, patients were treated in the context of populations and groups rather than on a one-to-one basis.

The attentiveness to the singular manifestations in the life of a given person is a distinctive feature of the work that Sigmund Freud, and later Jacques Lacan, developed. Instead of a normative approach to human suffering based on ideals of 'mental hygiene', 'normal functioning', biological or cognitive approaches, both psychoanalysts favoured exploration around the singular marks of a subjects relation to language.

This introductory year-long programme explores Jacques Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: transference, repetition, the unconscious and the drive in the context of contemporary debates on mental health.

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious