FUNDAMENTAL ITINERARY
1 - History of psychoanalysis
12h of recorded classes + 12h of live classes
What could be a renewed historical reading of psychoanalysis through its institutional movements, the evolution of its theoretical framework, its conceptual apparatus, its practice, its presence in the city?
We will try to answer this question in this new course based on a bet: we must think about and question the history of psychoanalysis so that it does not close itself off in its past and its dogmas.
Professors: Fabrice Bourlez (France/Belgium), Jed Wilson (USA)
2 - Fundamental concepts
12h of live classes
This course on Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis proposes a meeting space between different trajectories, welcoming both those who already have experience and those approaching for the first time. With clear and rigorous language, it seeks to make central concepts accessible and highlight their power in understanding the contemporary subject.
Throughout the course, tools will be offered to foster dialogue with other disciplines and open new possibilities for listening and interpretation. It is an invitation to build new perspectives, both for beginners and for those who wish to reinvent their own path in psychoanalysis.
Professor: Mônica Godoy (Brazil)
3 - The opening of Lacan's twenty first seminars
40h of recorded classes + 15h of live classes
For several decades Jacques Lacan will provide a teaching especially during his Seminar. He will say repeatedly: he does not seek to transmit a knowledge. His seminar is a space for a psychoanalyst to say, in the position of an analysand.
Lacan closes his text “Psychoanalysis and its teaching” with the following words: “A return to Freud, which provides the material for a teaching worthy of the name, can only be produced by the pathway by which the most hidden truth manifests itself in the revolutions of culture. This pathway is the only training that I can claim to transmit to those who follow me. It is called: a style.”
Teaching: insignis in Latin; what is marked with a sign.
What sign and what style is this Seminar about?
To explore these questions, we propose to study rigorously during this year, each month, the first sentence(s) of a seminar. We will start with the first and continue like this, chronologically until the 20th. This proposal will certainly be the opportunity to trace a possible path within this teaching.
Professors: Benoît Le Bouteiller (France/Brazil), Marta Marciano (Brazil)
4 - Construction of the Clinical Case
12h of live classes
The construction of the clinical case is a practice at the very heart of the history of Freud's discovery. This course inscribes itself within that long tradition, one inseparable from the very ethics of psychoanalysis. Each month, an IIP faculty member will offer a succinct presentation of a clinical situation drawn from their own analytic practice. It will be for them to demonstrate the possible construction of the case and to draw from it its own invention — between structure and singularity. Ample time will be reserved for discussion and debate following the clinical presentation.
Professors: Jed Wilson (USA), Ceren Korulsan (Türkiye), Fabrice Bourlez (France/Belgium) , Berjanet Jazani (Iran/UK), Nicolas Tajan (France/Japan), Elsa Godart (France), Yara Castanheira (Brazil/Germany)
TRANSVERSAL ITINERARY
1 - Freud, from his texts
10h of live, recorded and discussion classes
Sigmund Freud is primarily a doctor and researcher specialized in brain anatomy and the nervous system. It is through articles that he will give to hear, from this starting point, the path he draws and which leads to the invention of psychoanalysis. This course offers an immersion in a part of this Freudian adventure. Professors will each seize an article by Freud and will visit it, question it, extract the guidelines, say how this text feeds the clinic, a research in the process of being done, but also say the limits, the errors that mark out, perhaps, the Freudian text.
Professors: Ceren Korulsan (Türkiye), Fabrice Bourlez (France/Belgium), Berjanet Jazani (Iran/UK), Elsa Godart (France), Nicolas Tajan (France/Japan), Gabriel Tupinambá (Brazil), Yara Castanheira (Brazil/Germany)
2 - Artists, scientists, and philosophers in dialogue with psychoanalysts
4h30 of live classes
Psychoanalysis does not live in isolation. It is nourished by the questions the world poses to it, as well as by those it has not yet managed to formulate. In this spirit, we invite three professionals to speak about their work: a scientist, an artist, and a philosopher. Each will come with their own tools, their own enigmas, and their own relationship with the human subject. None of them will be called upon as spokespersons for psychoanalysis. And that is precisely the essential point, for the aim is to learn to listen differently. To hear a researcher describe their protocols and perceive, beneath the surface, what science does with the subject — or what it erases from them. To listen to an artist speak about their creative process and recognize, in their hesitations, something of the subject of desire and of the unconscious at work. To accompany a philosopher through their questions and sense where thought becomes embodied, where the concept turns into action. These three sessions are not illustrations of psychoanalytic theory. They are an invitation to practice, from the very beginning of one’s formation, this fundamental gesture of the analyst: to be traversed by a discourse, to receive what exceeds it, and to allow it to work within oneself. What each speaker says about their own world speaks indirectly to us about that of a contemporary psychoanalysis in motion.
Professors: Rafael Malagoli (Brazil) and others to be confirmed
3 - The practice of the psychoanalyst
5h of live classes
How does a psychoanalyst receive a patient? How do they listen, intervene, endure silence, navigate moments of crisis or impasse? How do they think about what they do — and what they choose not to do?
These essential questions rarely find answers solely in theoretical texts. It is in the encounter, in the way a practitioner speaks about their work, in the tone of their voice, and the style of their thinking, that something like the transmission of knowledge becomes possible.
This is the aim of this new course. In each session, a psychoanalyst is invited. A group of students will have prepared in advance a series of questions concerning the most concrete and technical aspects of clinical work: conducting therapy, handling transference, timing and interruption, session endings, analysis beginnings, difficult moments. These questions open the encounter; others emerge along the way, carried by the lively exchange.
From one session to another, different styles are shown and heard, not to extract a unified doctrine, but so that each student can perceive, in a lived way, what the idea of an ethics of psychoanalysis entails — not as an abstract principle, but as practice.
Professors: Mônica Godoy (Brazil), Jed Wilson (USA), Berjanet Jazani (Iran/UK), Fabrice (France/Belgium)
4 - Psychoanalysis and the contemporary world
16h30 of live and recorded classes
4.1 Introduction to topology
4h30 of live classes
The final part of Lacan’s teaching invokes unusual mathematical figures — Borromean knots, Möbius strip, tori, cross-caps — not as ornaments or metaphors, but as full-fledged tools of thought for the human subject. To engage seriously with this field, one must be willing to be surprised by a discipline that dismantles the certainties of space and form.
For this reason, we have invited a mathematician, a topologist, to open, in three sessions, a gateway into this domain. The goal is not, of course, to turn students into mathematicians, but to allow each person to develop a topological intuition — this particular way of thinking about continuity, deformation, inside and outside, and cutting — which will make Lacan’s work less opaque and, above all, more fertile.
The course will be conducted in a spirit of dialogue and accessibility. No mathematical prerequisites are required. It is aimed at anyone wishing to prepare for Lacan’s late seminars and the theoretical and clinical developments that extend from them.
Professor: Lukas Baugher (USA)
4.2 Class about autism
3h of live classes
Some psychoanalytic institutions and formation programs still operate through the universalist logic that permeates interpretations of dissident experiences, including atypical ones. Thus, it is urgent to understand that the experiences of autistic women in Brazil, among other issues, are shaped by specific social and cultural frameworks.
In defense of theories that are decolonial, anti-ableist, and aligned with revisions of epistemic violence, we present a discussion committed to the historical reparation of bodies rendered invisible by Lacanian-oriented analytic discourse. Drawing mainly from the works of Brazilian autistic women, we seek to offer the community another path, different from the way international autobiographies are locally received — some still mediated by translations and readings that seem more concerned with fitting autistic writing into theoretical dogmas than with welcoming a form of self-knowledge.
We therefore invite you to reflect: under what conditions can psychoanalysis sustain listening and make room for the dignity of autistic people’s testimonies?
Professors: Tatiana Gomes (Brazil) and Lílian Paula Serra e Deus (Brazil)
4.3 Psychoanalysis and situated knowledges: plural epistemologies
4h30 of live classes
Decentering Psychoanalysis - Professor to be confirmed
Jalil Bennani proposes a critique of Eurocentrism and colonial psychiatry, as Frantz Fanon did. In order not to be imported, psychoanalysis must be (re)appropriated and thus, should rely on a local geographical, political, cultural, and linguistic context. These are the best possible conditions for a true transmission, considering the future of psychoanalysis which needs to renew itself, reinvent itself, and this is only possible through other horizons.
Race, Gender, and Class - Jeferson Nicácio (Brazil)
Would this mean making space for the voices silenced by the history of psychoanalytic institutions? Or is it rather about developing a critical perspective on certain attitudes and theories stemming from Freud’s discovery and its effects? Undoubtedly… We believe this necessary movement can emerge through a singular clinical, political, and theoretical practice. In this course, a psychoanalyst will evoke, through a critical approach to different issues, a possible embodiment of the perspective of decolonization.
4.4 Post-human jouissances
3h of recorded classes + 1h30m of live discussion
Our bodies enjoy. We enjoy touching (ourselves), seeing (ourselves), speaking to (ourselves), missing one another. Freud denaturalized our bodies by approaching them through libido and drives. Lacan returned to Freud by inventing the objet petit a and surplus-jouissance. In doing so, both revolutionized the way the sexual field was understood. Yet both also confined sexuality and its specificities solely to the human realm.
But if we follow Foucault’s teaching, the figure of Man is itself an invention destined to disappear. In the age of machines, networks, artificial intelligence, chips, and nanotechnologies, in an era of globalized technological crises and the Anthropocene, is it not time to think of a posthuman unconscious?
This course will therefore focus on posthuman forms of jouissance. It will seek to take up a challenge: to reflect on how clinical practice operates and transforms itself in light of the paradigm shift affecting our modes of enjoyment.
Professor: Fabrice Bourlez (France/Belgium)
WELCOMING SPACE
1 - Time to listen
7h30 of live classes
A one and a half hour session at the end of each two months to collect questions and comments regarding the content of the courses and the formation in general. In this space the word will be listened to in the singularity of each one, as from the ethics of psychoanalysis. The content of these bimestriel meetings is open to the consideration of requests from anyone who wishes to make them.
Professor: Hugo Valente (Brazil)
2 - Presentation of the formation
1h of live classes
3 - Introductory course for group presentation
2h of live classes
