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Classes

Pulsion offers seminars and classes open to the public and which confer continuing education credits for licensed psychoanalysts, psychologists, and clinical social workers in New York State.
Pulsions: A Seminar by Jean Michel Rabaté
Lacan’s Library
Fridays, Jan 17, 24, 31 & Feb 7, 28, 2025
5pm-6:30pm Each Day
321 West 44th Street Suite 510
New York, NY 10036
And Via ZOOM
Fee: $50 per session/$250 total
For Tickets & Registration, Email Pulsion

The aim of this class is to explore in depth Lacan’s entire corpus, a body of work that can be understood both as a coherent discourse and constituting an open-ended system. Lacan referred (often elusively) to a number of authors whose gathering constitutes an ideal psychoanalytic library. Thus, we will foreground Lacan’s readings of Freud as the main founder of discursivity. We will tackle a few important literary authors Lacan discussed so as to assess how they helped him modify Freud’s concepts. We will survey philosophers whose insights were needed to reach a temporary synthesis. By recreating Lacan’s library, one gains a deeper insight into his teaching, his methods, his clinical strategies, and his particular use of writing.

• January 17: Translations and systemic irritations—the concept of translation in psychoanalysis, and the critical conversation with Derrida.
• January 24: How Lacan reads Freud: Hamlet, The Dream of Irma, The Project’s Thing, Freud on jokes.
• January 31: How Lacan reads Freud’s cases: the critique of Dora, the Young Homosexual Woman, President Schreber, and the Wolfman.
• February 7: Lacan reads literature to the letter, from Poe to Joyce via Sade and Gide.
• February 28: How Lacan reads philosophy: Plato’s Symposium, Sartre on affects, Merleau-Ponty on the gaze, and Aristotle on the soul and sexuation.

Fee: $50 per session/$250 total

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will be able to survey two key theories and name four major concepts of Jacques Lacan’s revision of psychoanalytic theory.
2. Participants will become familiar with concepts that can be applied when interpreting canonical case studies.
3. Participants will be able to identify specific links between the main tenets of Lacanian theory and their own clinical practice.

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Seminar with Jennifer Yusin
Subjective topology and the operations of the psychoanalytical cure
Fridays March 7, 14, and April 4, 11, 2025
5pm - 6:30pm each day
321 West 44th Street Suite 510
New York, NY 10036
And Via ZOOM
Fee: $250
Discount for Pulsion members.
Free for candidates.
For Tickets & Registration, Email Pulsion

This seminar will focus on the necessity of subjective topology in psychoanalysis through an emphasis on the two major operations of the psychoanalytical cure: analysis of the fundamental fantasy and sublimation. To do so, we will take up the three fundamental discoveries of Lacan: subjective division (barred subject, associated with the moebius strip), the borromean knot (the support of neurosis), the clover knot (the support of psychosis). Starting from there, the seminar will refer to the necessities of psychoanalytical practice by showing how psychoanalysis can use the Borromean knot to think through the structure of the unconscious.

We will discuss how transmitting the truth of analytical experience requires a knowledge that gives us access to symbolic castration, or in Freudian terms, a reduction to our secondary narcissism. This is linked to analysis of the fundamental fantasy. This knowledge also involves sublimation, which reduces the jouissance that destroys us. Psychoanalytical practice needs a consistency in analytical knowledge is needed for our practice. We will also discuss how such consistency must be supported by a theory that makes sense and a topology that brings some certitude.

This seminar will refer to:
Freud, The Ego and the Id
Lacan, Seminar 19: …Or Worse
Freud, Case of Elisabeth von R (from Studies on Hysteria)

Jennifer Yusin is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Philadelphia, and Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy and Director of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Drexel University. Her most recent book, A Psychoanalytic Approach to Sexual Difference (New York: Routledge, 2023), analyses the concepts of sex and gender, showing how sexual difference is characterized by ongoing transformations of spatiality and body, and of essentiality and normativity. Yusin develops subjective topology as a methodology showing how sexual difference is linked to transformations of sex and body. Through this, Yusin highlights how it is necessary to reformulate sex, gender, and sexual identities in psychoanalytic theories and in the practice of psychoanalysis.

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