This seminar explores the crucial difference between training and formation and assesses the evolving nature of becoming a psychoanalyst. Drawing upon three decades of clinical practice, Pauline O’Callaghan will map the vagaries of formation via the work of Freud, Lacan, and recent psychoanalysts as an ongoing dialectical process directed by the idiosyncrasies of knowledge, truth, symptom/sinthome, the direction of the treatment, and consider what the ending of an analysis is. The seminar will also discuss the process of “Registered Practitioner” which is an indicator of psychoanalytic formation in the Irish context.

This seminar evaluates the history, role, and context of madness in Ireland and critically explores the asylum system and the concept of “care” in social, cultural, historical, and institutional terms. The history and evolution of the practice and profession of psychoanalysis in Ireland forms an essential aspect of this seminar.

This seminar re-considers Lacan’s reframing of the Freudian unconscious and its manifestations in parapraxes, symptoms, dreams, and witticisms within the psychoanalytic clinical setting. Drawing from Freud’s major case studies, current case work will also be used to exemplify instances of the unconscious in practice, as well as differentiating the symbolic and real forms of the unconscious.

This seminar assesses what “being” a psychoanalytic practitioner is and what distinguishes psychoanalytic practice from psychotherapeutic practice. The seminar situates psychoanalytic practice and a psychoanalytic identity within twenty-first century Ireland and the broader field of mental health and contemporary “dis-ease” as well as the challenges to establishing and maintaining a specifically psychoanalytic practice.

The ethics of psychoanalysis were important enough for Lacan to devote an entire seminar to them. This seminar explores what makes “ethical” practice in psychoanalysis and evaluates challenges in the contemporary era to maintaining the ethical position specific to Lacanian psychoanalysis. This includes rigorous consideration of Lacanian ethics as a distinctive field of ethical practice, thought, and engagement.

This seminar evaluates the clinical structure that is psychosis, its specificities (schizophrenia, paranoid psychosis, untriggered psychosis) and implications for contemporary technique. What is a differential Lacanian clinical practice oriented to working with patients with psychosis?

Patients are increasingly presenting with diagnoses of autism, Asperger’s syndrome, ADHD, and dyspraxia sometimes in combination and increasingly in adults as well as children. How can we understand these presentations and their symptomatic expression via classical and modern psychoanalytic theory? Does practice require adaptation to work with these “disorders”?

This seminar evaluates the clinical structure that is hysteria, the manifestation of which led to the founding of psychoanalysis. Technically for both Freud and Lacan the hysterical “turn” in an analysis is significant. What are the modern specificities of hysteria and its implications for contemporary technique and clinical practice?

The liberalization of social field, its openness to sexual minorities, and the efflorescence of gender identities is indicative of our times. How does this work with the psychoanalytic emphasis on the importance of sexual difference and the sexual non-rapport? How does contemporary clinical practice respond to these changes and how do these changes fit with Freud and Lacan’s conceptualizations?

This seminar is a research module and supports candidates in developing their writing and research repertoires. In addition to assessing various writing and research supports in the wider psychoanalytic field, the seminar addresses the role and arc of writing and research for contemporary and future psychoanalytic practice.

This seminar works through the significance of the category of Registered Practitioner, its resonance as form of the psychoanalytic discourse, its specific role and function within APPI, and its relevance to the developing practitioner.