Continuing education and social commitment
Following my graduate studies, I did personal work in analysis for about ten years during which I joined the association “Le Questionnement psychanalytique” – a member of the European inter-associative of psychoanalysis – in order to deepen my theoretical and practical knowledge by meeting a community of experienced practitioners. Even today, the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan remains at the core of my reflections and learning. I obviously try to expand this essential body of work by meeting contemporary and international authors.
In parallel to my work in a reception center for people with mental and psychic disabilities, I took a postgraduate course in psychoanalytical therapy at the University of Ghent in order to better understand the different approaches and logics in my field of activity. However, the most important knowledge and skills for my practice as a psychoanalyst rarely come from institutions. It is indeed the more direct encounters that best punctuate my reflections. I am thinking in particular of the “Reading in Psychoanalysis” seminars or the “Philosophy and Psychoanalysis” meetings; but also of the I-AEP colloquiums in the presence of certain figures from Jacques Lacan’s inner circle.
More than colloquia or seminars, it is the “cartel” work and the flesh-and-blood meetings that constitute the foundation of the psychoanalyst’s inscription in his or her community and more broadly in society. As such, I work every week in a variety of directions…
In addition to an effective clinical approach, the collective dimension of the Freudian unconscious in its contemporary developments, as well as the philosophical inscription of Lacanian reflection, allow, in my opinion, to feed a critical thought well beyond the consulting room.
In this way, I try to support an analytical thought that is deployed on several fronts of a social or societal commitment that seems to me – perhaps more than ever – absolutely vital. These efforts will be found in the field of mental health and psychoanalytical actors on the one hand, but also in my choice of a socio-political inscription and through a work of active encounters with contemporary thinkers, all fields combined. The two are obviously destined to cross regularly and in a durable way in a dynamic of attraction and repulsion evoking without difficulty the metaphor of an original pulsation with a sexual resonance… Thus:
In the field of mental health, it seems essential to us to carry out intense work for the safeguarding and perpetuation of psychoanalysis in our ultramodern era dominated by a scientism struggling with the “traps of realism”. Similarly, lobbying of political parties has become necessary to ensure that the particularity of psychoanalysis is respected in the regulation of the mental health professions.
A psychoanalytic contribution to the socio-ethical debates related to ultramodern psychological problems and the way they are addressed seems to us to be of primary importance. For example, in the field of prevention and treatment of behavioral disorders in children, on autism in a court of law and in the education sector; on the culture of evaluation in companies and from there in all sectors of society, on the fascination for perversion and crime, …
On the other hand, each exploration of the fields of philosophy and psychoanalysis, but also that of the sciences, makes us understand to what extent these fields essential to the inscription of the human being in this reality are only the emanation of something deeper, difficult to say, sometimes invisible. This primordial “thing” is never better found than sublimated by another field, too often forgotten or neglected in the contemporary political landscape, that of Art. We therefore plead for a re-inscription and a firm reaffirmation of the fundamentals of the central role of the arts and culture in our societies; and of course we militate for adequate means to be allocated to it.
In the mesh of an internationalist and citizen political movement forged in the successive failures of a certain Europe to finally become social, we try to participate in the creation of a movement of thought adapted to the complexity of our time, supported by figures as diverse as Slavoj Zizek, Noam Chomsky, Laurent de Sutter, Roger Waters or Srećko Horvat and many others, more anonymous…