
psychoanalysis
non_object relations
I am in my formation as a candidate analyst at the Lacan School of Psychoanalysis [LSP].
What
I'd name my analytic orientation non_object relations – for the bodied lack around which the unconscious forms, cleaving human relations (as speech, desire, and law) – relations which love dreams, writes, weaves and frays, and our symptoms and sufferings ache to express – otherwise.
(When language enters us, the unspeakable is born.
When we enter language, a beyond-language bodies us.)
As analyst I act in echo of this dual limit, giving ear to the singular speech it combines to cause. Each person, arriving with their in-most, own-most language, a very singular/singing one within our shared language – teaches me, as they themselves learn by hearing it – its quality of growing strangeness – their own-most world’s tongue. This – the analyst listening to desire's listening to what it is hearing and feeling itself say – is the ethical ground of the practice.
How
There’s always a question – often asked in very … specific … tones – about the efficacy, or goal of a psychoanalysis – asked in the shadow of the big house of Therapy. Happiness? Productivity? Peace? Sex? Relational calm? A valid question, posed from, or even by, the circulation of goods: a guarantee, that is, a demand, of getting what one pays for – a demand of a good by a Good. In this sense, the analytic non_object is this lack of a good – the impossibility of the perfect exchange – and the site of analysis is half-outside this marketplace of the good – in the sense both of mores, and of production. What struck you? marked you? marketed you? your denomination, sent you into circulation – sent you/r desire spinning – what? When? Who? How? The site of analysis, famously known as the other scene, generates Other questions. It is precisely desire’s absence of a guarantee – or even desire for this absence as a fundamental pulse of life which is a primary orientation of psychoanalysis, and from which – paradoxically – Lacanian framed psychoanalysis works.
(The notion of the contronym,
a single word with two opposing meanings,
is fundamental –
not to the meaning, but to the lived, feeling sense of psychoanalytic terrain.
The word 'cleave', for instance: to split; and to join.
Each word we speak – of course few are actual contronyms –
always thread, like dreams, through the body, to its 'other' side.)
And so speech, and the speaking of our dreams, its repetitions like sea against rock, eventually abrades The Other Scene into the Other, seen – absent. A real lack (or ab-sense, sense of something missing) traces a path as desire, as return, guided by a thing lost that never was.
This return path is understood bound to a time when natal tongue and mother tongue are cleaved by a fundamental difference, a difference not unlike the paradox of the contronym: we are taught to say I, via a word given by a stranger, but – our felt-sensed body lacks its word, a word not-given from out there, but spelled by the life in here: it's this time when language, family and culture installed 'the sexual'.
Then, however one responded to this insult (and we each respond singularly), to this beautiful insult of culture and civilization when language, family and culture installed the sexual – at a later moment its stakes return, and are re-turned on: law, sex, culture, I.
Generally, what brings one to analysis is sewn to this time of division, or its second time –
(perhaps another link to the contronym, a beyond–I sense:
di-vision: sewn, competing views)
time of this primary conflict re-turning on –
a time called 'adolescence'.
When
A psychoanalysis for our historic moment – this one – demands an approach well-steeped in its predecessors and therefore able to reply to this present – ours, not theirs. Our present – a regime of the self-itself thought visible; of one's image-item used to treat one's missing whole, a hole now traced and defined by scientism, a – perhaps – image-nary medicine. A looking-glass time, as L & R often seem confused. A time of logo, not logos. A time when the visible is rightly sensed in peril to what lives beyond the gaze – which is then hashtagged: #anxiety. And yet – as the unconscious is said to know no time, analysis' other scene is exactly this: what is nowhere out there is spoken nowhere else but in here.
Style
As a lineage, my approach is in the aftermath of Freud and Lacan, and contemporarily adjacent to GIFRIC – the Quebec school of Willy Apollon, whose teachings, formed in their work with psychotics, I am in also conversation with. Through the pass of my life’s experience, I’ve found these descriptions of lived human subjectivity vividly accurate – a singular adventure set out before birth towards an always receding beyond, in search of a lost object that never existed, but – or rather, and so – is real; an always-thwarted adventure of a speaking-desiring-nonunified-sex-dream-at-work-body, sewn to, but not defined by, the biologic – an adventure not of being-towards-death, but astride it –
Freud, Lacan and Apollon’s profound respect for – and defense of – the sanctity of each singular being in their suffering and genius – all advocates for the stranger within – is the esthetic and ethical ground from which their theory has emerged. For me, this, above all, is the ground and horizon of the practice.
The profundity of their respect for this stranger within – and without –
only deepens with continued reading.
How, again
Speech is (still) the material of analysis, what we work with, and the fundamental rule (still) is: say anything that comes. Comes – not just to mind, but elsewise as well. Dream, fantasy, daydream, failure and physical symptom; the goods, the bads.
Our bodies, envelopes of a letter always en route.
The LSP takes very seriously the notion – an ethical one – of the Lay Analyst, which in some sense was Freud’s and Lacan’s notion of an analytic ideal.
As my site here attests, I am a professional artist (BA, MFA), across various modes; and work and teach in æsthetic, somatic and analytic fields.
Accordingly, I am licensed in California as a Research Analyst, which, as far as I know is a status unique to that [still unique] State.
CA License #RP 295.
My current understanding – as of Spring 2025 – is Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Jersey, and New Mexico – having no statutes regarding psychoanalysis – allow me to see people in those States in addition to CA.
In other situations, I make myself available explicitly for non-object analytic consulting.
I don't take insurance.
I oppose valuing psychoanalysis as a luxury good.
My fees are negotiable.
If you are interested in working together, have thoughts or questions, or anything else – please do write me here.