Seminar Description: Psychoanalysis began with Freud paying special attention to what came out of the mouths of his female patients (Emma Eckstein, Dora, and others), and he formulated hysteria as the expression of repressed material in symptoms, behaviour, and sexuality. Since antiquity, hysteria has been linked to sexuality, especially women’s sexuality, and those links are emphasised and developed in psychoanalysis by both Freud and Lacan. For Lacan, hysteria is formulated as a question about sexual difference and what it means to take up a position as a man or woman. Under the guidance of Pauline O’Callaghan, a psychoanalytic clinician and tutor in psychoanalysis, this seminar will explore the status of hysteria as a structuring element in present-day psychoanalytic theory and in clinical practice.

Tutor Bio: Pauline O’Callaghan has been for many years a registered practitioner with APPI (the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland) and is also a member of the ICP. She has a private psychoanalytic practice in Dublin and is also a clinical supervisor. For almost 20 years she taught psychoanalysis modules in DBS and also taught in Independent College and in St Vincent’s University Hospital. She served for many years on the Executive Committee of APPI as well as on the Scientific and Ethics committees. She is one of the directors of the Freud Lacan Institute and is chair of the editorial board of the psychoanalytic journal Lacunae.

Seminar Description: Drive is a word that we use vaguely to refer to human motivations. We say, without a great deal of precision, that this or that person has a lot of drive or that someone is driven. In this sense, Freud is right: the drive is a more or less mythical concept that has to be posited to account for behavior that we observe. But in a search for greater precision Freud ultimately rejected the positing of what he called ad hoc drives. This leads us to the question of whether the psychoanalytic drive is the same as the drive of common everyday understanding. In other words, is the psychoanalytic drive continuous with the commonly understood drive? This question of the continuity of the drive will be our guiding thread. We can also ask, for example, if the psychoanalytic drive continuous with whatever bodily drives we may have, as Freud assumes it is. Or rather is there a sharp break between bodily needs and the drive that psychoanalysis theorizes? Also, the concept of the drive has arisen only intermittently in history. We must come to grips with this discontinuous history of the drive and question those philosophers who would trace a continuous drive concept in the history of philosophy. To do so makes of the drive a metaphysical concept—something that Freud has also been accused of. In our reading of Lacan, we’ll posit that Lacan confronts directly the problem of the continuity of the drive.

Tutor Bio: Dan Collins, PhD, MSW, is a psychoanalyst living and working in Buffalo, NY. He is the education director of the Lacan Toronto psychoanalytic group, and there he presents an annual seminar. He is also an overseas member of APPI and the founder of Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups. Dan is also a translator of Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller and has translated, among other texts, Lacan’s Seminar 24.

Seminar Description: Psychoanalysis since Freud emphasises that human desire is central to the human condition and this is because desire is based on the eternal search for the impossibly lost object. This is the object which causes human desire and nowhere is this more elegantly theorised than in Jacques Lacan’s concept of the object a, cause of desire. The object a is an indefinable and non-specular ‘object’ which captures the evanescence of the object as lost, yet it is ever-present in the fundamental phantasy of every subject, with roots which extend back to our earliest existence. As well as causing desire, the object a also emerges behind the most compelling effects of the unconscious in the form of symptoms which present in the psychoanalytic clinic. In particular, it is intimately associated with anxiety and with the depressive states of melancholia. Its functionality extends even further to the psychoanalytic encounter between analyst and analysand in the form of the “desire of the analyst”. Lacan emphasises the lost object coming to be incarnated in the analyst who must ethically refuse to be put in an idealising position and instead work to support the separation of the subject from their object cause of desire. This seminar with Kevin Murphy explores how psychoanalysts work with desire, the object cause of desire and phantasy in clinical practice. It will also include clinical material which will illustrate more fully the concepts under discussion.

Tutor Bio: Kevin Murphy (PhD, MICP, Reg. Pract. APPI) is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Dublin for fifteen years. In his clinical practice, he works, among other things, with sexual issues and his doctoral and ongoing research is in the area of asexuality, defined as the experience of no sexual desire for another person. He completed his doctoral research under the supervision of Russell Grigg at Deakin University in Melbourne. He regularly presents conference papers in Ireland and abroad and is currently working on a monograph of his doctoral thesis.

Seminar Description: The diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD) refers to a collection of symptoms under the category of personality disorders that became popular in psychiatry the 2000’s. Psychiatrist, psychoanalytic practitioner, and writer Aisling Campbell assesses the significance of this categorisation of symptoms and offers a psychoanalytic perspective of borderline. Drawing on Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage and his structural approach to diagnosis, Aisling assesses “borderline” as a consequence of the barred subject’s alienation in the field of the Other’s desire and problems of identification with the “image” in the Other. What borders are in question in borderline and how is this subject presenting in today’s clinics?

Tutor Bio: Dr. Aisling Campbell is a consultant psychiatrist at Cork University Hospital, a senior lecturer at University College Cork, and a psychoanalytic practitioner. She has published papers on anxiety, PTSD, training in psychoanalysis, Freud’s pre-analytic writings, hysteria, eating disorders, and borderline.

Seminar Description: Drugs and drug use are an increasingly prevalent part of our culture and show no signs of decreasing. The seminar assess how psychoanalysis can make a decisive contribution to the problem of addiction and help us understand how drugs affect people and how people become addicted to drugs. Drawing on the work of both Freud and Lacan, and under the expert clinical tutelage of Rik Loose, who has researched and written on the psychoanalysis of addiction, this seminar considers the role of the “administration of jouissance,” the ethical domain of the treatment, and the space for the singularity of the “speaking subject” in directing the treatment.

Tutor Bio: Rik Loose is a member of ICLO-NLS, the APPI, the NLS (New Lacanian School) and the WAP (World Association of Psychoanalysis). He is former Head of Department of Psychoanalysis in DBS School of Arts and former Senior Lecturer there. He also initiated, developed and presided over an MA in Addiction Studies in the same college.

Seminar Description: This seminar, under the tutelage of the psychoanalyst and writer, Carol Owens, assesses the centrality of ambivalence at the heart of subjectivity and human relations. Freud, in asserting that love and hate are always present, made room for both sides of this coin and decried the effects of disavowing the role of ambivalence. Carol will explore how the foreclosure of the effects of ambivalence produces symptoms that are significant in areas such as mourning, sexuality, and in the othering effects of racism and xenophobia. Drawing on her extensive clinical and research experience, Carol will discuss the role of ambivalence in how we interact with others, in loving and hating the self/other, and the “enjoyment” permitted by neoliberalism and contemporary capitalism.

Tutor Bio: Carol Owens works in private practice at Arduna in Clontarf, Dublin. Her most recent book is “Psychoanalysing Ambivalence with Freud and Lacan: On and Off the couch” (with Stephanie Swales) published in 2020 (Routledge). She is the series editor for Studying Lacan’s Seminars at Routledge.