I am in my formation as a candidate analyst at the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis [LSP], San Francisco, CA.

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What

I'd name my analytic orientation non_object relations – for the in-bodied lack around which the unconscious forms, cleaving human relations (as speech, desire, and law) – which love dreams, writes, weaves and frays, and our symptoms and sufferings ache to express – otherwise.

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(When language enters us, the unspeakable is born.

When we enter language, what is beyond language bodies us.)

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As analyst I act as support to this lack, giving ear to the singular speech it continues to cause. Each person, arriving with their own-most language, a one within our shared language – teaches me, as they themselves learn by hearing it – its quality of growing strangeness – their world’s tongue. This – the analyst’s desire-to-know as listening to desire – 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 of getting what one pays for – a guarantee of a good by a good. In this sense, the analytic non_object is this lack of a good – the impossibility of the perfect purchase – and the site of analysis is half-outside this marketplace of the good – in the sense both of mores, and of desire-production. What struck 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 lack of any guarantee – or even a desire for this lack – as the fundamental pulse of life – which is a primary orientation of psychoanalysis, and from which – paradoxically – it knows it works.

 

Speech, its repetitions like sea against rock, eventually clarifies The Other Scene into the Other, seen – as absent. A lack (or ab-sense), tracing a path of return in desire, guided by the thing lost (pre-sen[s]ce) – that never was. This return is understood as being in structural – and impossible – proximity to the time one's natal tongue and one's mother tongue are cleaved by fundamental difference. The time when what language, family and culture have installed – as the sexual – is turned on. Generally, staked to the dividing-time called 'adolescence'.

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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-visible; of one's image-item used to treat a missing whole, a hole traced by scientism, a perhaps image-nary medicine. A looking-glass time, as L & R often seem confused. A time when the visible is in peril to what lives beyond the gaze.

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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 I am in also conversation with. Through the pass of my life’s experience, I’ve found these descriptions of human subjectivity vividly accurate – an 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-body, tethered to but not defined by the biologic – an adventure not of being-towards-death, but astride it –

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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 outsider 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.

 

How, again

Speech is (still) the material of analysis, and the fundamental rule (still) is:  say anything that comes. Comes – not just to mind, but elsewise as well. 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 esthetic, 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 [always unique] State.

CA License #RP 295.

 

My current understanding – as of Fall 2022 – 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 research.

I'm happy to speak about the difference.

I don't take insurance.

 

As mentioned above, I offer sessions in person or remotely.

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.