Events and Seminars

Event:What Does Research Have to Do With Psychoanalysis?
Venue:Online and In Person at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 112a Shirland Rd, London W9 2BT, London
Date:07/05/2025
Duration:8:15pm - 9:45pm BST / 3:15 - 4:45pm EDT
Extra Info:Speaker: Gregorio Kohon
Discussant: Alessandra Lemma
Chair: Fakhry Davids

Psychic reality cannot be reduced to either the mental or the physical — the psychoanalytic object has its own characteristics, categories, and laws. Psychoanalytic theories are based on fundamental hypotheses and basic assumptions that have been arrived at through a mixture of clinical experience and self-reflection, speculative intellectual activity and intuition, free-floating attention and deduction, and the attribution of retrospective meaning and abstract representations.

Psychoanalysis does not offer a single, uni?ed, comprehensive theoretical model, nor can it propose an exclusive clinical approach to its object of study. The question of research is confronted by the complex nature of the object of analytic inquiry, reiterating the inappropriateness of any single paradigm. In considering research in psychoanalysis, ontological questions are as relevant as epistemological ones.

The establishment of a particular and unique dialogue between patient and analyst characterises the psychoanalytic discipline. Clinical practitioners are accountable for what they do. In order to define the boundaries and aims of their work, psychoanalysts describe their theoretical ideas and clinical approaches through the study of single cases.
Organised By:The Institute of Psychoanalysis
Web Link:https://psychoanalysis.org.uk/civicrm/event/info%3Fid%3D1750%26reset%3D1
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