Over the years, the IIP has offered high-quality formation programs, bringing students and professors from around the world together to advance the project of developing a living, contemporary psychoanalysis – one that is open and non-dogmatic. If you are engaged in clinical practice, are wishing to reinvigorate your study with a fresh perspective, and want to engage with the essential questions of psychoanalytic technique, this formation program is for you.
*to be confirmed
This formation program is intended for individuals who already have some clinical experience. Classes are conducted by a team of faculty from different parts of the world who are widely recognized in their respective fields. The cohort brings together students from diverse backgrounds, fostering encounters with otherness and broadening the horizon of exchange.
The program consists of a year-long intensive inquiry into the foundations of psychoanalytic technique. Primary areas of focus include the topological paradigm developed in Lacan's later teaching, and questions of clinical ethics from the standpoint of contemporary issues and its inscription within a counter-hegemonic perspective. This formation encompasses the domains of theory, research, supervision, and reflection on clinical experience, forming an integrated environment of study and practice.
At the IIP, courses and seminars are led by professors of different nationalities, backgrounds, and professional paths. Our aim is to provide comprehensive and rigorous psychoanalytic formation while fostering research activities. We also promote theoretical dialogue with other fields of knowledge, including the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and the arts.
The International Institute of Psychoanalysis offers innovative and pluralistic formation that reaches beyond geographical borders and institutional affiliations. We aim to cultivate an open dialogue with professionals from diverse trajectories while preserving the independence that helps orient our way of working and our ethical position.
Hi! My name is Zaíra, I’m a psychologist joining the IIP formation. I got to know the IIP through my supervisor who is also a professor at the Institute, and I was amazed by the inclusion politics, the quality of the professors and the themes approached during the formation. I’ve been in other schools and institutes and I can say it’s the place where I felt the most welcome and heard. I feel better prepared for clinical practice and I recommend it to people who, like me, are looking for a space with quality formation.
My formation with the IIP was a kind of (de)formation, whereby I was able to deconstruct and challenge psychoanalytic norms and Lacanian orthodoxies that had hindered my clinical practice. The IIP is a safe, open and intersectional community to find your own way and style in both the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. I highly recommend it.
When I entered the IIP I knew that the formation would be highly professional and with solid ethical values, but I couldn’t imagine its pertinence, its richness, and the joy that would cheer me up when listening to all the professors within their singularity, their humility, and their taste for psychoanalysis, communicating us their research and their passion, to sum up: their desire. I learn in every class, I also face difficulties (a formation that flies high), but in general I’m pleased to apprehend a decolonized psychoanalysis, to work, to inform myself, to learn and to unlearn, to relearn and to take the time to digest while discussing with my formation colleagues. The cultural abundance that emerges is a real source of inspiration. The IIP is a passionate encounter, like meeting a work of art, an artist, a poet, with so many curiosities to discover, to be astonished and marveled. One doesn’t leave the formation the same way they started, that’s for sure. It’s a real joy to be able to embrace the opening that this “IIPesque” adventure brings us, and thereby apprehend ourselves differently.
Taking part in the IIP formation has introduced me to a new experience of psychoanalysis. Being among such diverse people and listening to voices that are also heterogeneous, talking about psychoanalysis from their unique trajectories makes me comfortable to also find the space to be diverse and to create my own path throughout psychoanalytic studies and practices. The classes and professors create an environment in which there’s space for emptiness and a bit of anxiety that accompanies those who propose to venture into the psychoanalytic (not) knowing, encouraging us but also welcoming us.
My experience in the IIP formation has been truly transformative. Coming from a Legal background, I found in psychoanalysis, especially in the in-depth study of Lacan, a new way to understand the complexity of the human being and their relationships. The IIP provided me with a rigorous and welcoming study environment, where I could delve into concepts that were once distant to me, but now prove to be essential for my practice and my life. With each class and each reading, I feel my worldview expanding and I am walking a path of deep and meaningful discoveries. I recommend the IIP formation to everyone seeking a serious and passionate immersion into the universe of psychoanalysis and who wish to experience changes as profound as the ones I am undergoing.
Manali Arora - India - student of the 23/25 IIP formation
The IIP is attentive to accessibility and, since its foundation, has implemented initiatives to support the inclusion of individuals with diverse needs as part of its ongoing effort to broaden access to psychoanalytic transmission. Upon request, all of our events can be translated into Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). We also work to ensure the inclusion of people with visual impairments by providing audio description of our content.
©2025 - International Institute of Psychoanalysis
13h30m of recorded classes + 13h30m of live discussions
For the psychoanalyst, as for the artist, the problem of method articulates itself as a discourse on technique: not a codified set of procedures, but a living garland of questions, the fundamental paradoxes that each analyst must confront in their own way. In this seminar, we will put psychoanalysis itself into question; as a necessary consequence we will be put into question as well. From where in our being do we inaugurate the analytic function? How do we bring a rigorous reading to the case without violating the singularity that is at the heart of every analytic treatment? Down such avenues of curiosity and perplexity, we will pursue the essential ethical and epistemological problems of the practice of the psychoanalytic art.
Course schedule:
Professor: Jed Wilson (USA)
12h of recorded classes + 9h of live discussion
“Lacan, Back to the Future” proposes a temporal shift in psychoanalytic teaching, bringing to the clinic the current situation and the rupture represented by the “last Lacan” and the possible advances from him.
We propose an immersion in which the foundations of mathematical topology and the theoretical-clinical demands of psychoanalysis are intertwined in an unprecedented way.
The approach of the Borromean knot as a paradigm of psychic plasticity establishes the basis for understanding the dynamics of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary.
The course methodology combines conceptual presentations and case analysis, integrating mathematical rigor and clinical sensitivity. In this way, participants learn to apply topology as an innovative tool, applying mathematical concepts to inaugurate listening practices that consider subjective complexity in all its plasticity.
12h of recorded classes + 12h of live discussion
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, at each month the first sentence(s) of a Seminar. We will start with the Seminar 20th and continue like this, chronologically, until the 27th. This proposal will certainly be the opportunity to trace a possible path within this teaching.
12h of live classes
The construction of clinical case is a practice that is at the very heart of the history of Freudian discovery. This course is therefore part of this long tradition inseparable from the ethics of psychoanalysis. In this course, each month, one of the professors of the IIP will present in a narrow way a clinical situation resulting from his own analytic practice. It will be for him/her to show and demonstrate the possible construction of the case and extract from it his/hers own invention, between the structure and the singularity. Ample space will be reserved for discussion and debate following this clinical presentation.
9h of live supervision
Supervision, also referred to as control, has been one of the fundamental pillars of psychoanalytic practice since its inception. It is easy to show that a psychoanalyst cannot, under any circumstances, forgo this practice. This pillar, as we know, is closely linked to personal analysis and the ongoing training of the clinician. In this program, we invite students to experience this practice within the framework of a small group. This group supervision does not replace individual supervision, of course. However, it is a rich and fruitful modality that has existed since Freud. Each student will be part of a group that meets once a month. At each meeting, one of the members will present a clinical case that will serve as the basis for the supervision session. Each group will be accompanied by a professor or IIP member who will serve as the supervisor.
Professors to be confirmed
9h of group research encounters
At the IIP, we consider research activity to be fundamental to the practice of psychoanalysis. Each person, from their own position, can and should participate—each in their own way and with their own style—in the advancement of psychoanalysis through this endeavor. We invite students in this formation to take part in a research group. This group will meet once a month and will be accompanied by a professor or IIP member. Within this small unit, each participant will be invited to develop a personal research question that will accompany them throughout the course of the formation. Everyone will also be invited to share within the group the current state of their individual research process.
Although this is an individual research project, it can only take place within a working community. That is the aim of this moment of formation.
Professors to be confirmed
10h30m of live 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.
4h30m of live classes
Further information to be disclosed soon
5h of live classes
This course invites, in each session, a psychoanalyst to speak concretely about their work — conducting the cure, handling transference, timing, difficult moments — in dialogue with a group of students who have prepared questions. The aim is not to produce a unified doctrine, but to allow different styles to emerge, so that everyone can grasp, in a lively way, what an ethics of psychoanalysis as a practice truly means.
6h 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. These bimonthly meetings are open to the contingency of requests from whoever wishes to do so.
1h of live classes
2h of live classes
Please note that dates are subject to change