We recognize that the work of Sigmund Freud constitutes the heart of psychoanalysis.  Thus the teaching of the Freudian discovery is essential.  In the context of a series of courses, Freud's work will be presented and discussed with the aim of providing the necessary and indispensible foundation for psychoanalytic work.

The subsequent development of psychoanalytic thought up to and including the current psychoanalytic revisionism has had the effect of repressing the Freudian project. Lacan saw this repression being played out and in response embarked on his own project to answer to the threat to the Freudian project. This novel project confronts the advances of neuroscience and technology - including information transfer, and of globalization – and, hence, has become increasingly crucial for the future of humanity, at that very point where the subject is no longer considered.

Since then, others have continued the work which Freud and Lacan opened up.  Apollon, Bergeron and Cantin – in Quebec – have applied their psychoanalytic research and interventions with young psychotic patients to the clinic of the neurotic and to cultural analysis and intervention, work in which NRPI is also engaged.

Distance Learning

NRPI welcomes distance learners, who “enter” the classroom via telephone/speakerphone.  Distance learners who are accepted into candidacy must at that point travel to Bozeman twice a year for in-person study.

Curriculum requirements

Personal or Training Analysis  – A minimum of 500 total hours of analysis is required, at a minimum frequency of three sessions a week. Candidates must complete their analyses to the point where they are able to authorize themselves as psychoanalysts.

There is always an ongoing practicum and supervision course available to all students.

A student may apply for a leave of absence which, if granted, is applicable for one year. During that year, a student may maintain his or her candidacy and return to studies under the same requirements which existed at the time of the granting of the leave of absence. After one year, the leave of absence is no longer valid and a student must re-apply for candidacy.

Symposia – Candidates and faculty members will meet four times in the academic year for presentation and intensive dialogue about quintessential psychoanalytic concepts and practices.

Candidates must attend a minimum of three of the four symposia a year.

Throughout the duration of their candidacies, students must be:

Continuously enrolled in at least one course per semester, in addition to semesterly weekend seminars;

Continuously in training analysis; and

Coursework

Twenty courses are required towards graduation as a psychoanalyst.

Our courses are constantly evolving, as we continue to be informed by our research and interventions, so that courses in any given semester will always reflect that principle.

Past Courses

The courses below have been offered in the past and are listed here to provide prospective students with examples of our teaching emphases.

Teachings of L’École Freudienne du Québec (EFQ

The EFQ has been, for more than twenty-five years now, elaborating and emending certain core principles of theory and practice as developed by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.  The clinic of the psychotic and its discoveries and applications of jouissance and the psychotic’s development of delirium have informed the theory of and work with the neurotic and the pervert, as those terms are conceived in Freudian and Lacanian thought.  These courses will explain and explore jouissance, the drives, the Oedipal or seduction fantasy, the primal scene or originary fantasy; the likenesses and differences and integrations of Freudian and Lacanian thought regarding castration and the castration complex, penis envy and castration anxiety, phallic and feminine jouissance; primary and secondary process thought, primary and secondary repression; the symptom, the signifier, and the fantasy, and the rock of jouissance on which the signifier fails; lack in being, traversal of the fundamental fantasy, desire, and construction of the object a.  All of these concepts will be presented in experience-near ways and made demonstrably relevant to students’ clinical work, personal lives, and social and cultural life.

Cultural Studies and Psychoanalysis: A Case Against Contemporary Facileness and for a post-Lacanian Critique

In today’s virtualized and globalized world, we run a great risk of determining humanity’s future based on the most facile of understandings, which clothe themselves in both righteousness and pseudo-technointelligence.  With an appreciation for contemporary Culture Studies’ deployment of deconstructive analyses of what have too often slipped by as ideational “givens,” we will examine in detail the post-Lacanian contributions of Slavoj Zizek, Willy Apollon, and those additional thinkers who are critiquing the West’s Nietzschean Last Man approach to life, that passive nihilist position which lulls us into a terribly false sense of security and superiority, and which denies our self-destructive excesses.   Jouissance and desire, and the place of a psychoanalysis which can offer a path to the leadership required to avert catastrophe, will be at the heart of our explorations.  Crucial interfaces between social analysis and the consulting room will always be close at hand as we pursue these thoughts.

Language and Psyche

This course will focus on Lacan’s theory of the relation between language and the psyche and his use of “the cut” to terminate sessions and maintain an opening onto the unconscious as well as such Lacanian techniques as “floating hearing” and “askew” interpretation. Readings from Lacan’s Ecrits will include: “Function and Field of Speech and Language,” “Instance of the Letter,” “Signification of the Phallus,” “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” and “Logical Time.”

Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

This course will cover the four key concepts of Lacan’s rereading of Freud. Beginning with the unconscious and repetition, which is to say symptom formation, we will strip away the concrete and metaphorical ideations surrounding these concepts and recast them as functions rather than things. Likewise the object will submit to this scrutiny, as will drive and transference. In addition to Lacan’s Seminar XI, students will need to be familiar with Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” Group Psychology and Ego Analysis, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and the cases of Dora, Wolf Man, Anna and the female homosexual. A copy of Holbein’s painting, “The Ambassadors” will be made available.

This This course will examine Lacan’s reconceptualization of psychosis through case studies presented in The Courtil Papers (available on-line). Covering such concepts as foreclosure of the paternal function and its consequences, metaphor and metonymy, the mirror relation, and suppleance or the substitutive structures that can serve to stabilize the psychotic subject, teaching will center on the cases to give us grounding in the concrete realities of the clinic. Readings will include Lacan’s Seminar III: Psychoses, “Some Questions Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” and untranslated materials such as Lacan’s doctoral dissertation and paper on Les Soeurs Papins will be brought in. Students should be familiar with Freud’s case study of Schreber’s memoirs. 

The End of Analysis – Paris

This course will begin with the question: How do we know when we have affected a cure? What becomes of the transference? What is the best possible outcome for our analysands? In short, we will explore our aims and goals as analysts. The course will bring together the defining elements in Lacan’s concept of the end of the psychoanalytic cure: the crossing of the fundamental fantasm, the fall of the object, subjective destitution and mourning. Questions dominating our discussion will center on the desire of the analyst. We will examine several essays from the Ecrits: “Variations on the Cure Type,” “Direction of the Treatment,” and “Position of the Unconscious.” Ms. Linse will bring in untranslated material from “La Conclusion de la Cure.”

Special Topics

Special topics courses can arise out of student request, such as the course on dialectic in Hegel and Lacan, or out of our discussions in other classes, as the course on sexuation did. Special topics courses might cover other seminars such as Anxiety or RSI, or they might be team-taught and cover general issues like ethics, transference mgt., etc. from a variety of schools of thought.

Psychopathology in psychoanalytic thought

The word pathology comes to us from the Greek pathologia, which means the study of emotions and is defined in Webster’s as: 1. the study of the essential nature of diseases and esp. of the structural and functional changes produced by them. 2. something abnormal a : the anatomic and physiologic deviations from the normal that constitute disease or characterize a particular disease. Freud’s papers that are usually classed under the heading psychopathology might be summed up in general as those papers dealing with anxiety, the part played by sexuality and differentiation between neurosis and psychosis, the ultimate essay being “Inhibition, Symptom, Anxiety.” We will begin our course this semester with a discussion of what psychopathology means in terms of our practice: i.e. the practical uses and the pitfalls of diagnosis. Then we will explore the structural and functional elements of the neuroses, psychoses and perversions. The course will end with student presentations of case studies written on current cases, or literary sources, using what you have discovered through the course.