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Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics rose from the pandemic as an urgent call to move beyond the subjective angst and disaffection of patients in our consulting rooms to heed the maladies of society. We see this as a timely and necessary intervention in psychoanalysis as a discipline undergoing a shift in the ways in which it thinks the psychic and social together as bodily, sexual, drive-oriented phenomena.

The Pulsion ethos applies psychoanalytic thought with creativity and clarity to address larger socio-political concerns (societal, economic and political malaise, viral and environmental threat, global conflict and epistemological confusion) as we train a new generation of psychoanalysts to treat not only today’s patients, but also patients for the generations to come.

Two Tahitian Women by Paul Gauguin, 1899. Original from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image: Rawpixel Ltd, CC by 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Pulsion emerged in the pandemic as an attempt to bring back what was central to Freud’s thinking, the body, the drives and sexuality, in order to meet our current societal demands. Beyond the urgencies of our days, one impetus for the creation of Pulsion rests on our deep concern about the relative abandonment, in American psychoanalysis at the very least, of Freudian drives and their socio-anthropological roots and effects.

We mean to bring into being an institute constructed to think across these realms. For this reason, we intend to think alongside psychoanalytically oriented academics, as we develop the thought of Pulsion with respect to new or emerging clinical realities.

Pulsion’s academic and training missions incubate the fervent hope to foster a new and renewed appetite within the younger generations for Freud with his revolutionary discoveries of sexuality and the unconscious. We bring together Freudians, post-Freudians and Lacanians as faculty and aspire to attract young candidates, practicing clinicians of course, but also academics from a wealth of related disciplines.

Ancient of Days Setting a Compass to the Earth by William Blake
Ancient of Days Setting a Compass to the Earth, by William Blake, 1794. Image Rawpixel.

Our mission stands on belief that the contemporary subject needs a re-thinking of the psychoanalytic theory and technique with the Economic Model of Freud’s theories of the body and the drives serving as a central foundation for a contemporary psychoanalysis that meets the demands of cultural evolution.

The integral component of a transitional psychoanalysis is the bedrock of Pulsion’s training: the structuring function of the analytic frame and a close attention to the analytic process. It targets the strengthening of the preconscious to take place, facilitating the subject’s capacity for symbolic thinking, free association, creativity and desire.

For every individual who has the zeal to learn and practice psychoanalysis for themselves and others, Pulsion’s mission is to foster a deep appreciation that among these others is an Other that resides within one’s own unconscious. Because this Otherness within resists domestication, Pulsion places equal focus on the subject as an individual as well as on the subject as part of a social group.

Diversity of culture, socioeconomic status, national origin, race, ethnicity and gender identity contribute to Pulsion’s wellspring of generativity and creativity.

Todos Somos Migrantes Street Art from Comuna 13. Medellin, Colombia.