École freudienne du Québec

With clinical presentations by members of the Psychoanalytic Circles of the Freudian School of Québec combined with teachings and discussions led by GIFRIC training analysts Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron and Lucie Cantin.

Thursday, March 1st and Friday, March 2nd, 2007
8:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Institute of Neurobiology, 211 Del Valle Boulevard, Old San Juan

A presentation of the Psychoanalytic Clinic for the Family in Québec and Montreal will take place on Friday.

Admission: US $225

Make checks payable to: Círculo Psicoanalítico de Puerto Rico. Checks for registration should be sent (postmarked) no later than January 30, 2007. Registration after that date will be US $250. Please send checks to Círculo Psicoanalítico de Puerto Rico, 1007 Muñoz Rivera Ave, Suite 801, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00925-2724

For further information please contact:
Mayra Nevares Alfredo A. Carrasquillo
Tel (787) 568-6414 Tel (787) 646-8647

Quebec at the Caribbean:
the effects of the visit of members of GIFRIC to San Juan, Puerto Rico

On February 12, 13 and 14th, 2004 and at the Center for Public Policy Research in San Juan, the Clinical Days of the Freudian School of Québec took place in Puerto Rico. Participants from Québec and Montreal spoke in French; colleagues from Boston, Chicago and San Francisco spoke in English; and locals from Puerto Rico, Argentina, Chile, Dominican Republic and Ecuador spoke in Spanish. This great cultural mix didn’t turn into a Babel Tower thanks to the excellent job of three translators (we always had two on every meeting) and a great desire of all the participants to learn and share their work.

The seminar consisted of the presentation of clinical cases that were then discussed by the group and supervised by Willy Apollon Ph. D. and Lucie Cantin M.Ps., training analysts at GIFRIC (Groupe Interdisciplinaire Freudien des Recherche et d'Intervention Cliniques et Culturelles). The diversity of cases presented was enriching. From presentations of cases of patients that had been in analysis for some time and where dreams were analyzed and the analytic technique was refined, to cases were practitioners were starting a psychoanalytic work, cases of work with children, and the unique experience of the Family Clinic of Québec and Montreal. The themes discussed in this seminar were varied and of fundamental importance to our formation as analysts. Of all the issues discussed, it was particularly relevant to me what was discussed on the specificity of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and how to guide our daily work. During these clinical days and those immediately after the seminar I found myself thinking about the three dimensions of the experience that flow together in the clinical practice of all of us and which I see as essential to the clinic of psychoanalysis. These three aspects should not be confused and they should be taken into account in the psychoanalytical experience. These aspects are: the particular subjective experience of each patient; the cultural specifics that contribute to the ideologies of the subject and its everyday experience, and the universal aspects that constitute the human experience as well.

On the one hand the psychoanalytical experience, the clinical experience of working with analysis is based on the particular subjectivity of each analisand. Each person that comes to our office is unique: his or her history, her symptoms, the fantasy that determines him, everything that person brings to the analytical scene should be listen to as a particular and unique account. In the way that we listen there is no generalizations allowed. The psychoanalytical diagnosis does not authorize us generalizations about the treatment and about patients. As a matter of fact, Freud and Lacan, in different moments, made the analogy between a psychoanalysis and a chess game: we can plan moves for the beginning of the game, we know of ways it can end, but we never can predict how the game is going to be played. Only on the experience of listening to the unconscious, one person at a time, is it possible “après coup”, to bear witness to the play of signifiers, to the meaning of the symptom, to the family narrative, to the playing out of the phantasm, to all that is constituted in a unique way on each subject’s account and subjective structure.

On the other hand there are cultural specificities that contribute to the particular ideologies of the subject. To my surprise this cultural specificities were not as important as I thought. There is a difference in how a meaning is constructed on a specific culture or subculture or on what a signifier points to in that particular cultural scenario. The cultural differences are important to understand the particular ideology of a subject or how a particular experience is signified on that cultural context. The way that families are structured in Puerto Rico, for instance, is definitely not the same as it happens with families in Québec. But as a matter of fact the same difference can be found between middle or upper class families in Puerto Rico and poor families of the public housing projects. How we structure the external aspects of our practice (our office space, the time and spacing of the visits, the family members we see, the cost of the session, etc.) is influenced by this differences. But the experience of the analysis, the experience of listening to what comes from the Unconscious is the same in San Juan, in Boston, in Québec, in Montreal or in San Francisco.

The analytical experience is based on the fundamentals of the human experience. We are born of man and woman, we lost our organics instincts due to the trauma of language, we assume a masculine or feminine position due to a complex process of subjectivity that inserts us as subjects in the human culture. This subjetivation process turns our organism into an erotic body and differentiates us from the biological order of the rest of the animals. Freud points to the fundamental nature of the experience of the unconscious, of that which is outside of the conscious experience, of that which insists and repeats itself in the story of each one of us, of that we don’t want to know about and that appears in the symptom, in the lapsus, in the dream, in wit and in repetition.

This is what is specific of the psychoanalytical work; this is what concerns us as analysts, wherever we are in San Juan or in Québec, or San Francisco or in Boston, in South America or Europe. We face the Real that comes from the Unconscious, we insist on a way of listening for which we lend our body and in which we involve all of our being. As analysts it is our desire to know about this that comes from the Unconscious, this that makes each human unrepeatable and unique, this that nobody wants to know about. That is why meetings like this in San Juan are important as a space of formation for those who dare to support that which comes from the Unconscious, to listen to a subject that suffers of all that he cannot put into words.