Psychoanalysis occupies an unusual place in the field of culture; at once a highly specialised, obscure discipline for schooled practitioners and inescapably the province of ‘Everyman’.

Still, this ‘at once’ deserves a closer look; a little interrogation. ‘Why?’ You may ask. ‘Well, because it harbours the fine yet iron-clad lines operating the divisions between fields that seemingly blend and blur.’ Analysis allows us to mark the junctures at which the subject parts company with the ‘Everyman’, as s/he resolves to undertake a singular path on what is inescapably a solitary leg of the journey.

Lacanian Forum names a place for such a ‘closer look’, a ‘little interrogation’; offering a transitional space to approach the urgent matters that confound us; treating them with conversation enriched by the questions and discoveries opened by the experience and practice of psychoanalysis.

The forum invites engagement between those for whom psychoanalysis arouses interest, provokes reaction, prompts questions and others, practitioners working in the Lacanian orientation, who have turned that curiosity, that reaction, those questions into a practice with which to bear, to navigate and, where possible, to negotiate the problems and impasses; in short, the pathologies of everyday life.

Lacanian psychoanalysis is not a technique; it is an orientation. In order to demonstrate something of the consequences of this, the Lacanian Forum will facilitate conversation through ongoing events around contemporary problems. Thus offering an encounter with the Lacanian orientation as it presents throughout its adherents, one by one.

We look forward to that encounter.

Penny Georgiou

Convenor – Lacanian Forum