Annual Research Lecture 2025
What does research have to do with psychoanalysis?

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, unified, 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.

Speaker: Gregorio Kohon
Discussant: Alessandra Lemma, Chair: Fakhry Davids

Wednesday 7th May 2025, 8.15pm - 9.45pm (UK Time)
Institute of Psychoanalysis and Online

The annual Scientific lecture is open to all members of the general public.
A recording available for 1 week to all registered participants.

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