The APPI Executive Committee is pleased to confirm that the 2023 Congress `Returning to the Clinical Case Study` will be held in-person and via live stream on Sat Nov. 18th, 2023 at the Royal Marine Hotel, Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin. We are delighted to announce that Rik Loose and Stijn Vanheule will be keynote speakers. Information on the Congress schedule, booking, etc., will be forthcoming.
[Lacan: “Science and Truth”]“To say that the subject upon which we operate in psychoanalysis can only be the subject of science may seem paradoxical. It is nevertheless here that a demarcation must be made, failing which everything gets mixed up and a type of dishonesty sets in that is elsewhere called objective; but it is people’s lack of audacity and failure to locate the object that backfires. One is always responsible for one’s position as a subject. (…) The psychoanalyst’s position leaves no escape, excluding as it does the tenderness of the beautiful soul.”
This Congress interrogates the clinical case study. Can the case study highlight the knowledge of the psychoanalyst in line with ethical responsibilities while also providing an interface with the demands of academic and scientific discourse? A daring his/her-story, the case study invites its audience to engage with theory as practiced. Personally riveting, clinically relevant, theoretically illuminating and subjectively energising, the case study can be the anti-thesis of a deadening objective narrative. As a work of qualitative research, the case study can offer psychoanalysis an interface with the discourse of science and the demand for ‘evidence based ’research. Case studies present ethical responsibilities that may be difficult or impossible to fulfil. These concern the contract of confidentiality between analysand/analyst and the responsibility of placing psychoanalysis as a theory and practice within the order shaped by a demand of the Other, something that Lacanian practice and the singularity of the unconscious as its fundamental principle was created to immanently resist.
Freud’s clinical case exemplifies and tests his theory; Lacan uses the clinical case to illustrate a paradigm, the right time to act, or the wrong turn to take. Candidates for APPI’s Reg. Pract. present a clinical case to testify to their relationship to psychoanalysis and their competence in psychoanalytic theory and practice. These aspects of the case study make it an excellent theme for Congress in this moment when membership energy for the Reg. Pract. has waned and psychoanalysis in Ireland explores how it is recognised in a broader background of humanities, scientific research and competition for academic funding.
Papers are invited with focus on the following themes:
- Clinical case in the modern clinic: clinical cases on current symptom formation such as transgender, sex re-assignment, prodrome psychosis, neurodivergent etc.
- Clinical case and its relation to the fundamental concepts in psychoanalysis: How does a clinical case transmit theoretical concepts in Psychoanalysis?
- Clinical case as an academic production: How is psychoanalytic knowledge reproduced in research and in peer-reviewed publications?
Contributors are requested to submit a short abstract (250 words max) and title to [email protected] with the subject line “APPI Congress 2023”.
Deadline for Submissions: June 30th, 2023