Saturday 23 September 2017. 10:30 – 13:00
Carmelite Centre, Aungier Street, Dublin 2.
APPI Members: €20, Non Members: €25, Students: €10
Clinical Seminar with Ian Parker.
This paper is about case presentations, and specifically about the problems of representation and misrepresentation that bedevil them when an analyst attempts to transmit what has happened inside the clinic to an audience outside it. After reviewing the status of clinical case presentations in psychoanalysis and the role of language in the clinic, I home in on three questions about the role of truth in the analytic process to show that there are three corresponding traps that an analyst keen to talk about their analysands falls into. This critique of the form and content of clinical case presentations in psychoanalytic meetings and publications is pitched from within a Lacanian frame of reference, a return to Freud which also attends to the cultural-historical shaping of our practice in training and public professional forums, and it demarcates a properly psychoanalytic approach to the clinic from psychiatric, psychological and psychotherapeutic conceptions of treatment and how it might be described to others.
Ian Parker is a practising psychoanalyst in Manchester, secretary of Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix, and currently President of the College of Psychoanalysts – UK. His books on psychoanalysis include ‘Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity’ (Routledge, 2011).