Seminar of Formation 2025
The Analyst: Desire, Discourse, Symptom
The Lighthouse, Antonio Peticov
Seminar of Formation 2025 California Forum
The Analyst
Desire, Discourse, Symptom
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The Seminar of Formation of the California Forum aims to establish a continuous space for the transmission of psychoanalysis and the formation of the psychoanalyst in a Lacanian orientation. It connects local clinicians and other interested parties with the network of psychoanalysts and analysands that constitute the Forums of the Lacanian Field and their School.
This year, we’ll bring the analyst to the center of our interrogations. As a starting point, we are aware that the psychoanalyst is not an identity or a professional credential, but rather a position, a function. Lacan points out that Freud inaugurates a new type of social link with the analytic discourse. The analyst causes the analysand’s desire, directing them to interrogate their master signifiers and to produce a new knowledge from the truth of their very symptom.
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How can the analyst institute the analytic discourse? Their capacity to occupy this position derives from a discontinuity in the usual ways to desire that can take place at the end of one’s analysis. It is a desire that has no object, but just the aim to obtain absolute difference. This is what Lacan called the desire of the analyst.
The desire of the analyst implies that one has reached their own absolute difference. It comes from the reduction of the symptom to its dimension of letter, a residual mark of the subject that becomes the core of their identity, their being. The function of the analyst in regards this operation is to participate in the constitution of the analysand’s analytic symptom.
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Additionally, the desire of the analyst results from an act that may take place at the end of one’s own analysis. This is what Lacan called the psychoanalytic act. It concerns each one individually, but carries also a collective dimension as it is sustained in the scope of the School of Psychoanalysis, where each analyst transmits their testimony on the crucial issues psychoanalysis has to deal with at each epoch. This is what animates the psychoanalytic community and creates a space for each analysis to subvert the division between private and public realms.
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The seminar is intended for a heterogeneous audience. Discussion will be fomented via theoretical elaborations and clinical material.
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To join via Zoom:
Meeting ID: 875 4103 0733
Passcode: 906700
2025 Program Schedule
Monthly meetings
Saturdays, 11am to 12:30pm (PST)
Zoom, Free of charge
Responsible: Gabriela Moreira, PhD
1 / March 15th
Topic: The Analyst: To Be or Not To Be
2 / May 17th
Topic: The End of Analysis and the Psychoanalytic Act
3 / August 30th
Topic: An Unprecedented Desire
4 / September 20th
Topic: The Analyst of the School (AS)
Guest Speaker: Adriana Grosman
5 / October 18th
Topic: The Analyst Cause of Desire
6 / November 22nd
Topic: The Analyst Symptom
Guest Speaker: Ana Laura Prates
Selected Bibliography for this year's seminar:
Freud, Sigmund. (1912) “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII, pp. 109-120.
Izcovich, Luis. The Marks of a Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 2018. See Part V: The Mark of the Desire of the Analyst
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Lacan, Jacques. (1973) “Italian Note”
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Lacan, Jacques. (1969) “Overview of The Psychoanalytic Act”. The Letter, Issue 18, Spring 2000, Pp 104 - 114
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Lacan, Jacques. (1967) “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School”
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Lacan, Jacques. (1969-1970) The Seminar: book 17. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. New York, 2007: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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Lacan, Jacques. (1953) “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power.” In: Écrits. New York, 2006: Norton & Company, Inc. pp. 489-491.
Faculty
Adriana Grosman
Psychoanalyst with private practice in São Paulo. Analyst Member of the School (AMS) of the School of Psychoanalysis of the Forums of the Lacanian Field, member of the International College of Guarantee (2025-2026) and of the São Paulo forum, coordinator of the Psychoanalysis and Femininity Network.
Ana Laura Prates
Psychoanalyst and writer. Analyst Member of the School from the School of Psychoanalysis of the Forums of the Lacanian Field and member of Forum São Paulo Forum, where it coordinates the Research Network Body, Art and Technology. Post Doctor from Rio de Janeiro State. Publishing include: Femininity and Psychoanalytic Experience and “La Letra de La Carta al Nudo”. Coordinator of the Lacanian collection Lacanian Heresy.
Gabriela Moreira, PhD
Psychoanalyst in Private Practice, member of the California Forum and of the School of Psychoanalysis of the Forum of the Lacanian Field. Holds a PhD with the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Publishing include: Psychoanalysis and Political Theory, Reflections on Authority: A Dialogue between Hannah Arendt and Jacques Lacan. Jouissance as a Political Category, The Treatment of Anguish through Fantasy and Delusion.