Phobia offers a particularly revealing example of the way anxiety can become attached to an apparently specific object. The phobic object may seem irrational – a particular animal, place, situation, person, or activity – yet the intensity of the response suggests that something much more fundamental is being managed. This seminar will examine how the phobic object can function as a way of organising anxiety by giving it a name and a location. Rather than asking simply why someone is afraid of a particular object, psychoanalysis asks what function that object serves in the subject’s psychic economy and what anxiety is being contained through the phobia. Clinical and everyday examples will demonstrate how the apparently external object can become a crucial support for the subject.

Petros Patounas is a psychoanalyst and a founding member of the School of the Freudian Letter, where he participates in the ongoing work of psychoanalytic formation, transmission, seminars, Cartels, and clinical inquiry. His work is situated within the Freudian and Lacanian orientation of psychoanalysis, with particular attention to the questions of desire, the analytic Act, the Breath, the Alien, the Verbeing, and the position of the analyst. In his teaching and presentations, he approaches psychoanalytic concepts not simply as theoretical material but as questions that emerge from clinical practice and from the subject’s encounter with what cannot be fully known or mastered. His seminars seek to maintain a close relation between the conceptual developments of Freud and Lacan and the concrete experience of analytic work, encouraging participants to question, articulate, and work through the problems that psychoanalysis continues to pose.

Participation Fee: €50
School Members: €15

Purchase your ticket to attend the event through the link below.

https://www.ilppd.com/shop/p/the-phobic-object-and-the-management-of-anxiety 

For further information, please feel free to contact:

Anastasia
Secretary of the School of the Freudian Letter
Tel:99288776