Welcome.

 

I am in my formation as analyst, as well as a member of the faculty, at the Lacan School of Psychoanalysis [LSP].

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My fees are negotiable.

I don't take insurance.

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What follows below is a sense of my sense of the work of psychoanalysis, from both its sides –analysand (patient) and analyst.

The fundamental idea is:  psychoanalysis – the practice of free association, speaking whatever comes to mind or remembered as having come to mind – memories, dreams, passing thoughts elsewhere – speaking these things to a person in a time and place deliberately separated off from the 'world' – has effects which I can attest to, from both sides of its work.

To call its effects 'good' or 'not-good' are outside of its own understanding. That is not a coy marketing tactic. What psychoanalysis does, is:  it causes. Your response to what's caused is your work – inside and out – of analysis.

And so as all æsthetic and ethical works, it entails risk, risk grounded in the Good of singular human flourishing bound in a collective.

And while I oppose valuing psychoanalysis as a luxury good, payment is required. This too is part of its ethics:  it's not just 'two people talking':  by your act of payment – a symbolic act with real-world effects – you've excavated a space within the world where the norms – and the price – of what's sayable are suspended. In some sense these two costs – that of the session, and that incurred by speaking 'in the world' – are inverse reflections.

Within this 'freedom to associate' your work occurs. 

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What

Non_object relations – that's what I'd call psychoanalysis – an encounter of speaking bodied lack; the lack or absence around which we – our unconscious – forms, and cleaves – as in:  both cuts and binds human relations. We're bound and cut by speech; cut and bound in desire, in law, and it is these cuts-that-bind which love dreams, writes, weaves and frays; and which our symptoms' suffering aches express. Otherwise.

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(When language enters us, our unspeakable is born.

When we enter language -– before birth – our body-outside-language forms.)

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By showing up, both of us, in this place, the session (virtual or actual, no matter:  the voice cannot be separated from the body – either the one hearing or speaking) – the session, a place like nowhere else in the life of either of us – my role as analyst is your cause of this 'otherwise', 'elsewhere' speech. Each person, showing up with their in-most, own-most language, a singular/singing within our, or a, common language – speaks, and we both learn, session by session, hearing it – its growing uniqueness and specificity – your own-most tongue. This – my desiring to hear to what your listening and feeling may say – my desiring to know more of it, and – perhaps most crucially – without any prohibition on what may be said – this is the ethical ground and source of effect – efficacy – of the practice – although, as my time in its practice grows, I'm more inclined to think in terms of cause. And so – as repeating and restating are a crux of it too:  without any prohibition on what may be said – this is the ground and source of cause – mainspring – of the practice. Cause causing cause.

 

How

There’s always a question – often asked in very … specific … tones – about this efficacy, the goal, of a psychoanalysis – most often asked in the shadow of the big house of Therapy. Happiness? Productivity? Peace? Sex? Relational calm? A valid question, one posed from within, or even by, the circulation of goods:  a guarantee, that is, a demand, of getting what you pay for – demand of a good by a Good. In this sense, the analytic non_object – that which we bear half within – is this interruption of the market good – the impossibility of a perfect exchange, of receiving something whose purchase is the liquidation of one pole of responsibility  – and so analysis is half-outside the 'marketplace of the good' – both in mores and production.

                              What struck you? marked you? marketed you? minted your denomination, sent you into this spiral of circulation – sent you/r desire spinning – what? When? Who? How? Analysis, famously coined by Freud as the other scene, generates Other questions. It is precisely that desire lacks a guarantee – that we begin to consider desire for this lack a fundamental pulse of life. This is a primary orientation of psychoanalysis, from which – in its paradoxic – Lacanian framed psychoanalysis acts.

                           Lacanian analysis, now 45 years after Lacan, remains an extension of Freud, whose lives overlapped in time.

 

The contronym,

a single word with two opposing meanings, two sides,

is fundamental –

not to the meaning, but to the lived, felt-sense of psychoanalytic time.

The word used above, 'cleave', for instance:  to split and to join.

Each word spoken in session (of course few are contronyms)

threads through the body, to its 'other' side – what saying also says in its not-saying.

 

And so – speech, speaking dreams and fantasies, repetitions like sea against rock (hearkening the caustic in 'cause'), eventually abrades The Other Scene into the Other, seen – as absent. A real lack (or ab-sense, sense of a missing) traces desire's path as a return, newly guided by a lost thing that always-was never-was. Was actually its passage.

 

This return path is bound to a time when natal tongue and mother tongue are cloven into difference, a difference not unlike the paradox of the contronym:  we are taught to say "I", a word given by the stranger, but – our lived felt-sense lacks its own word; there's no place for that word out there, the one spelled by the life in here. It's in this time language, family and culture are installed – and are inextricable from these institutions' laws. What they are governing at its cultural root is the sexual; in fact, they are a means themselves of installing what then becomes 'the sexual'. We are sexuated via language and speech.

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Then, however one responded to this insult (and we each responded singularly), to this beautiful insult of culture and civilization – via the acts of the eyes and speech and bodies of others – when the language, family prohibitions and cultural norms are installed – at a later moment the challenges of these insults stakes' return, and re-turn on: law, sex, culture, I. 

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Generally, what brings one to analysis is sewn to this time, this second time –

time of this fundamental conflict – being turned on –

in both senses – attacked and aroused –

a time called 'adolescence'.

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When

A psychoanalysis for our historic moment – this one – demands an approach well-steeped in its predecessors and therefore able to reply to this present – ours, not theirs. Our present – a regime of the 'monetized' self-itself assumed as visible; of one's image-as-good as means to treat one's own insulted whole, a hole now traced and defined by scientism, a – perhaps – image-nary medicine. A looking-glass time, as L & R often appear switched or identical. A time of logo, not logos. Of monologue. A time when the visible is – correctly – threatened by what is sensed alive beyond the gaze – which is then hashtagged into silence:  #anxiety. And yet – as the Unconscious is said to know no time, analysis' Other Scene is exactly this:  what is nowhere out there is spoken nowhere else but in here. Where "our lived felt-sensed lacks its own word." 

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I have no true name in the world: this truth –

because it is true – is inseparable from insisting,

from demanding a 'diagnosis'.

Make me an object of knowledge; make me real; make me make marketable sense.

I don't deny the reality of diagnosis; but it is often used – by either analyst or analysand – as a means of censoring what seeks speech.

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And so the scene of analysis isn't symmetrical:  it's not the dispensing of knowledge from one container to another. It's fundamentally not about knowledge, but what's lived.

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Style

As to lineage, my approach is in this aftermath of Freud and Lacan, as well as contemporarily adjacent to GIFRIC – the Quebec school of Willy Apollon, whose teachings, formed in the clinic of psychosis, I am in also conversation with – but not with critique. Through the pass of my life’s experience, I’ve found their descriptions of lived human subjectivity – derived from their clinics – vividly accurate:  a singular adventure set out from before birth towards an always receding beyond, in search of a lost object that never existed, but – or rather, and so – is real; an always-thwarted adventure of a speaking-desiring-non-unified-sex-dream-at-work-body, sewn to, but not defined by, the biologic, but by an Other logic – an adventure not of being-towards-death, but astride it –

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Freud, Lacan and Apollon’s profound respect for – and defense of – the sanctity of our singular being in its suffering and genius – all fierce advocates for the stranger within – is the æsthetic and ethical ground from which their theory has emerged; because it emerges from the encounter with this stranger.

For me, this, above all, is ground and horizon of the practice.

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The profundity of their respect for this stranger within – and without –

only deepens with continued reading.

 

How, again

Speech is (still) the material of analysis; it's what we work with, and Freud's fundamental rule (still) is:  say anything that comes. Comes – not just 'to mind', but elsewise as well. Dream, fantasy, daydream, melody and nonsense and events of failure and physical symptom; the goods, the bads.

Our bodies, envelopes of a letter born en route.

 

The LSP takes very seriously the notion – an ethical one – of the Lay Analyst, which in some sense was Freud’s and Lacan’s notion of an analytic ideal.

As my site here attests, I am a professional artist (BA, MFA), across various modes; and work and teach in æsthetic, somatic and analytic fields.

I am licensed in California as a Research Analyst, which, as far as I know is a status unique to that [still unique] State.

CA License #RP 295.

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Repeating from above:

I don't take insurance.

I oppose valuing psychoanalysis as a luxury good.

My fees are negotiable.

If you are interested in working together, have thoughts or questions, or anything else – please do write me here.