What Ethics for Psychoanalytical Practice Today?

Barcelona, May 24, 25, 26 and 27, 2023 

Psychoanalysis has faced several resistances since Freud. Currently, it is  being questioned by neuroscience and cognitivism. Various  psychotherapies are competing with it, including religious ones. Some  countries tend to exclude it from state health or educational institutions. 

During the last fifty years there have been many political, social and  technical changes according to the neo-capitalist stage we are living in, affecting at the same time the individuals consulting us due to their  discomfort and us as psychoanalysts, since we are all divided subjects of  this scientific civilization. 

Lacan proposed a writing of capitalist discourse where social bond is no  longer linked to the impossible. The scientistic ideology feeds the illusion  that everything is possible and that the economic growth can be infinite.  There is a push to consumption that has created unpayable debts for  individuals, companies and nations. There is no longer a monetary  standard to refer to, and the markets are hyper-inflated in a flight forward  that is creating new bubbles. Meanwhile, social inequality and the planet  destruction have reached hard points of return. 

We are in a civilization that reifies subjects and pushes to jouissance,  which induces the anxiety of depersonalization and depression that are juggled by consuming objects, using drugs or psychotropic medication. An  alibi that only deepens the subject’s alienation from his suffering and his  desire.

How does all of this, affects the training and practice of psychoanalysts? 

What are the effects of reducing the frequency of analysis or supervision sessions? 

How to intervene when many of the demands received do not go beyond  the resolution -the fastest the better- of the anguish or the symptom?  What professional conduct of the cure could lead patients to undertake a  proper analysis? 

How the transference gets affected by the fact that loving bonds and  relationships have become fickle? 

Since online sessions are widespread, what are the consequences on our  act and the elaboration of the analysands? 

Lacan’s lessons on psychoanalytic discourse as the reverse of the master’s  discourse, and on the analyst’s desire which leads us to take the place of the object cause of desire regarding to the analysand, are essential to  answer these questions. 

This Congress intends to open a debate on these and other issues that  may arise to the ethics that guides our practice, based on the subjectivity  of our time.

Comisión Organizadora: Cercle freudien, Dimensions de la Psychanalyse, Fondation Européenne  pour la Psychanalyse, Psychanalyse Actuelle, con la participación de  Associaçao Psicanalítica de Porto Alegre y la Escuela Freudiana de Buenos  Aires.