Anxiety in the Body: When the Body Speaks the Real This seminar will explore the relationship between anxiety, the body, and the Real from a Lacanian perspective. We will consider how the body can become the site where something beyond words makes itself felt, and what anxiety might reveal when...

Anxiety can emerge not only because something is missing, but because the lack that normally structures desire appears to disappear. When the Other seems to have no lack, no uncertainty, no distance, or no place for the subject’s desire, the subject can find themselves confronted with an unsettling question: What...

What do we understand by the concept of the Other, with a capital O, the Big Other? Oedipus: Mother, the articulation between the couple, and the place of the (Name of the) Father Symbolic: Speech and Language, the Signifier, Society and the Law; Penny Georgiou Practising Analyst since 1998 Ongoing...

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...

Does giving anxiety a name help the Subject to ‘tame’ the anxiogenic source? Chara Pilavaki is in love with the psychoanalytic journey and its discoveries. I am very interested in exploring how the analysand can sustain a joyful life during and after her/his psychoanalytic experience in the longterm. Is finding...

Anxiety does not always remain an isolated experience. It can become organised into a symptom through which the subject attempts to manage, contain, or give meaning to what is otherwise difficult to bear. The symptom can provide a particular solution to an anxiety that has no obvious explanation, transforming an...

What is the symptom? What do we owe to that? It is the subject’s way of organizing and containing the anxiety by developing a repetitive formation with its own unique way. When our unconscious does that? When there is an unbearable dimension of desire or the Real which has nothing...

This seminar examines the relation between trauma, repetition compulsion, and anxiety through Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It asks why the subject may return to painful experiences that cannot be explained by the pursuit of pleasure or easily integrated into a coherent account of the past. Particular attention will be...

Anxiety marks a particular point where the subject encounters something that escapes the familiar coordinates of meaning. In this seminar, we will explore anxiety through a Lacanian perspective, considering its relation to the Real, desire, the Other, and the object a. We will ask what anxiety reveals about the subject...

The uncanny emerges when something that should have remained familiar, hidden, or repressed suddenly returns. Anxiety may appear precisely at the moment when the subject encounters something that is strangely familiar but cannot be comfortably recognised as their own. This seminar will examine the relationship between repression, the uncanny, repetition,...