The ATP endorses the roots of psychoanalysis in the Freudian tradition and simultaneously works to foster its evolution. We look to Lacan, among others, as an example of success in this endeavor. Many branches that still call themselves psychoanalysis have lost their footing relative to the unconscious and have been reduced to techniques of adaptation that are increasingly oriented by prevailing norms. When psychoanalysis becomes the appendage of capital, the university, or the state it ceases to be analytic. If it fails to disturb knowledge and unsettle certainty, if it is not uncanny, and most of all if it fails to make room for the subject of the unconscious to speak, then we do not call it psychoanalysis.

The ATP aims to celebrate the theory and practice of psychoanalysis by transmitting the desire of the analyst, particularly when defined as a desire for absolute difference. The clinical emphasis on uniqueness translates to a prioritization of the singularity of each student, each teacher, and each moment of transmission. The distinction between transmission and training is highlighted here in order to clarify one of the puzzles inherent to our task: the questionable status of knowledge. To paraphrase and recontextualize Freud, the value of training can, in so many cases, be reduced to that of menus in a time of famine. The concept of transmission, however, points towards a different kind of knowledge and in so doing affirms the view of education as an impossible, and therefore ethical, project. The transmission of psychoanalysis is never total because it is not a body of knowledge to be accumulated or a competence to be mastered. Through the renunciation of the image of completeness the work is animated and sustained. In other words, we resist the commodification of psychoanalysis in favor of its genuinely subversive nature.

The ATP is an association insofar as our relationship to the community is of great concern. Analysts in the Lacanian tradition are authorized by themselves and some others, and this demands attention to the question of community. Our work produces effects in the community and the work of our community produces effects in us. The study and evolution of psychoanalysis is carried out in community and in relation to other communities, by creating and discovering links between psychoanalysis and various other areas of study, including philosophy, mathematics, and the arts. This orientation carries a requirement for an approach that is, at times, tangential.

Association for the Transmission of Psychoanalysis

Excerpt of Letter to Elizabeth Mayer (January 1, 1940) by W.H. Auden