| About us |
| Lutecium a non-school of Lacanian/Freudian Psychoanalysis San Francisco, California |
Our psychoanalytic formation program, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is steeped within the Freudian and Lacanian
tradition and incorporates the latest in contemporary critical thought: postmodern, postcolonial, feminist, transnational,
and queer theories.
We have chosen to situate our trainings in the midst of downtown San Francisco rather than the academy or the medical
institution. We believe that situating psychoanalysis within the rapid exchange of commodity, exposing our project to the
ever changing art and political trends that define a metropolis will offer Lutecium's psychoanalytic work a certain circuitry
within the marketplace that ultimately assigns value and privilege to knowledge(s).
We are closely affiliated with Dimensions de la Psychanalyse in Paris and dedicated to exploring the interactions between
the social, political, and personal. We hold open seminars for those interested in psychoanalytic studies and offer formal
training for clinicians seeking to practice psychoanalysis.
It is our belief that an intellectual cultural exchange fosters a greater consciousness of the history and location of our
own psychoanalytic work. In turn, we believe the acknowledgment of location will help us to better serve the rich
diversity that characterizes San Francisco.
In our desire to transmit psychoanalytic training to students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, we have created
scholarship and work-study options for those who may not be able afford the full cost.
tradition and incorporates the latest in contemporary critical thought: postmodern, postcolonial, feminist, transnational,
and queer theories.
We have chosen to situate our trainings in the midst of downtown San Francisco rather than the academy or the medical
institution. We believe that situating psychoanalysis within the rapid exchange of commodity, exposing our project to the
ever changing art and political trends that define a metropolis will offer Lutecium's psychoanalytic work a certain circuitry
within the marketplace that ultimately assigns value and privilege to knowledge(s).
We are closely affiliated with Dimensions de la Psychanalyse in Paris and dedicated to exploring the interactions between
the social, political, and personal. We hold open seminars for those interested in psychoanalytic studies and offer formal
training for clinicians seeking to practice psychoanalysis.
It is our belief that an intellectual cultural exchange fosters a greater consciousness of the history and location of our
own psychoanalytic work. In turn, we believe the acknowledgment of location will help us to better serve the rich
diversity that characterizes San Francisco.
In our desire to transmit psychoanalytic training to students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, we have created
scholarship and work-study options for those who may not be able afford the full cost.
The following speech announcing Lutecium’s arrival was delivered By Rebecca Bauknight, Ph.D. at the Lutecium Psychoanalytic
Group’s first Open House in March 2007 at the San Francisco's Flood Building:
As Americans we are no longer living in isolation from others. The difficulty in opening ourselves to the discourse, “truths,” the history
of narratives that have defined reality and existence to those distant from our location, is pressing. Rather than seeing these advances
in exchange, mobility, inter-global communications, as threatening, it is our vision that we can begin to allow our own ideas to be
challenged, rearranged, and radically shifted by our times. It is our intention to actually move forward with our technological advances
in order to move Psychoanalysis into the technological era as other discourses advance through the use of online classes, live feeds in
classrooms, blogs, etc.
I believe that psychoanalysis - like our writing scene, our art scene, our theater and dance scene - are critical forms of expression right
now. I was amazed at Alonzo King’s Dance Company “Lines” who, trained classically in ballet, can drop at a moments notice into tribal
African dance movements. Such a wide ranging repertoire draws and compels us to watch the new. What is formed when cultures
collide and then express the layers of an intermingled history that reside within our current time and space, that reside within us? What
is compelling about these venues is that these works capture our just-lived moments and make them conscious. Where is
psychoanalysis in our times? How are we making our just-lived moments conscious for each other, students, our communities, and
most of all, our patients? How are race differences, immigration issues, our sexual orientations issues, our core gender issues being
addressed and made conscious through psychoanalytic discourse? How is psychoanalysis considering now our just-lived moments?
Freud and Lacan both remarked that psychoanalytic training warrants exposure to interdisciplinary studies. It is obvious in their work
that they weren’t bound to a specialized curriculum. They read, they reached, they observed, they spoke, they wrote. They very
actively sought their way to understand how the unconscious locked up patients in their symptoms. They spanned their times in
philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, literature as they searched everywhere for truth about the psyche. They too would
have been grabbing onto all of our contemporary discourses that we, guided and inspired by their serpentine paths through
knowledge, now reach for as a gesture of respect for their tireless method of investigation. They maintained a curiosity about life.
Human life.
The invitation to our program is extended to those who are curious about the unconscious; curious to find out things for themselves
without being limited to articles selected for “training purposes.” The vision is that we can find a way to participate and utilize
psychoanalysis and express our work through teaching and training, and in our clinical work, to contribute to the wider world that we
belong to now; not to simply proselytize. We want to reach out to people beyond our San Francisco location, our United States location,
so that we can offer the gift of renewal to Psychoanalysis. (A gift rests outside of the phallic economy. A gift enables the phallic
economy. No birth. No life.)
Lutecium’s vision is that the symptoms of our patients, the global symptoms, the political symptoms, that can resonate so easily with us
in as song, a play, a book, should by all means be able to resonate in our psychoanalytic seminars, our training, our writing, so that
this, in turn, will translate into the clinic.
We live in fragile times and it is now that our patients and our students most desperately need our vitality - our capacity to feel
excitement, newness, and break through; where those from near and far can have the opportunity to live an embodied existence
through a deep reverence of generational and transhistorical pasts that are deeply rooted in and through body identity markers. We
need a community that can replenish us and support a deep exchange relevant to the intermingling of difference; that can allow us to
be brave in our thoughts and our practices in order to preserve the “impossible” work of Psychoanalysis. It is my feeling that the cohort,
“the hoard,” the training ground, is the place where Psychoanalysis can come to life.
Does Psychoanalysis verge on love? Lutecium’s training community offers challenges to our symbiotic identifications to our patient’s
symptoms by enabling a replenishment though a focus on our most classic tenets as well as our most cutting edge thinkers in order
that we too can develop a wide-ranging repertoire.
When discourse is stagnant, seminars inhibited, oppressed, or too phallocentric, we operate at the level of fetish exchange regressing
to object exchange that translates into our work with each other, with our patients, with ourselves. We stop living, adding, contributing.
There is no possibility for a gift. We take these phallic exchanges far too seriously. There is no laughter. We could cease to exist as
any real serious force that can make a substantial impact outside of the small choirs we preach to that reside in our increasingly
isolated and cloistered Institutions. Psychoanalysis is a serious business that necessitates “jokes” - a subtle sign that repression rather
than disavowal or foreclosure is at work.
Psychoanalysis is a vital discourse that could strongly participate among academic and political discourses as well as art forms that do
deeply reach us. We need these discourses to express our psychoanalytic responses to them, to incorporate and enable
psychoanalysis to evolve along side the knowledges that inform us and at the same time allow us to differentiate ourselves from them
through our awareness, acknowledgement, and recognition of Other.
The vision of Lutecium is to bring passion and vitality to what has always been the interdisciplinary work of Psychoanalysis through a
psychoanalytic training that challenges subjectivity, through a close attention paid to the Other as unconscious, the other as language,
the other as outside discourses, the other as culture. We look forward to working closely with Jacques Siboni, M.D., our Senior Training
Analyst who has been involved with us for years and who will direct all levels of our training program. Lutecium is highly appreciative of
our affiliation with Dimensions de la Psychanalyse in Paris and we look forward to further exchanges.
For anyone who interested in participating in Lutecium’s Training Program, please email us.
Sincerely,
Rebecca Bauknight, Ph.D.
President
Group’s first Open House in March 2007 at the San Francisco's Flood Building:
As Americans we are no longer living in isolation from others. The difficulty in opening ourselves to the discourse, “truths,” the history
of narratives that have defined reality and existence to those distant from our location, is pressing. Rather than seeing these advances
in exchange, mobility, inter-global communications, as threatening, it is our vision that we can begin to allow our own ideas to be
challenged, rearranged, and radically shifted by our times. It is our intention to actually move forward with our technological advances
in order to move Psychoanalysis into the technological era as other discourses advance through the use of online classes, live feeds in
classrooms, blogs, etc.
I believe that psychoanalysis - like our writing scene, our art scene, our theater and dance scene - are critical forms of expression right
now. I was amazed at Alonzo King’s Dance Company “Lines” who, trained classically in ballet, can drop at a moments notice into tribal
African dance movements. Such a wide ranging repertoire draws and compels us to watch the new. What is formed when cultures
collide and then express the layers of an intermingled history that reside within our current time and space, that reside within us? What
is compelling about these venues is that these works capture our just-lived moments and make them conscious. Where is
psychoanalysis in our times? How are we making our just-lived moments conscious for each other, students, our communities, and
most of all, our patients? How are race differences, immigration issues, our sexual orientations issues, our core gender issues being
addressed and made conscious through psychoanalytic discourse? How is psychoanalysis considering now our just-lived moments?
Freud and Lacan both remarked that psychoanalytic training warrants exposure to interdisciplinary studies. It is obvious in their work
that they weren’t bound to a specialized curriculum. They read, they reached, they observed, they spoke, they wrote. They very
actively sought their way to understand how the unconscious locked up patients in their symptoms. They spanned their times in
philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, literature as they searched everywhere for truth about the psyche. They too would
have been grabbing onto all of our contemporary discourses that we, guided and inspired by their serpentine paths through
knowledge, now reach for as a gesture of respect for their tireless method of investigation. They maintained a curiosity about life.
Human life.
The invitation to our program is extended to those who are curious about the unconscious; curious to find out things for themselves
without being limited to articles selected for “training purposes.” The vision is that we can find a way to participate and utilize
psychoanalysis and express our work through teaching and training, and in our clinical work, to contribute to the wider world that we
belong to now; not to simply proselytize. We want to reach out to people beyond our San Francisco location, our United States location,
so that we can offer the gift of renewal to Psychoanalysis. (A gift rests outside of the phallic economy. A gift enables the phallic
economy. No birth. No life.)
Lutecium’s vision is that the symptoms of our patients, the global symptoms, the political symptoms, that can resonate so easily with us
in as song, a play, a book, should by all means be able to resonate in our psychoanalytic seminars, our training, our writing, so that
this, in turn, will translate into the clinic.
We live in fragile times and it is now that our patients and our students most desperately need our vitality - our capacity to feel
excitement, newness, and break through; where those from near and far can have the opportunity to live an embodied existence
through a deep reverence of generational and transhistorical pasts that are deeply rooted in and through body identity markers. We
need a community that can replenish us and support a deep exchange relevant to the intermingling of difference; that can allow us to
be brave in our thoughts and our practices in order to preserve the “impossible” work of Psychoanalysis. It is my feeling that the cohort,
“the hoard,” the training ground, is the place where Psychoanalysis can come to life.
Does Psychoanalysis verge on love? Lutecium’s training community offers challenges to our symbiotic identifications to our patient’s
symptoms by enabling a replenishment though a focus on our most classic tenets as well as our most cutting edge thinkers in order
that we too can develop a wide-ranging repertoire.
When discourse is stagnant, seminars inhibited, oppressed, or too phallocentric, we operate at the level of fetish exchange regressing
to object exchange that translates into our work with each other, with our patients, with ourselves. We stop living, adding, contributing.
There is no possibility for a gift. We take these phallic exchanges far too seriously. There is no laughter. We could cease to exist as
any real serious force that can make a substantial impact outside of the small choirs we preach to that reside in our increasingly
isolated and cloistered Institutions. Psychoanalysis is a serious business that necessitates “jokes” - a subtle sign that repression rather
than disavowal or foreclosure is at work.
Psychoanalysis is a vital discourse that could strongly participate among academic and political discourses as well as art forms that do
deeply reach us. We need these discourses to express our psychoanalytic responses to them, to incorporate and enable
psychoanalysis to evolve along side the knowledges that inform us and at the same time allow us to differentiate ourselves from them
through our awareness, acknowledgement, and recognition of Other.
The vision of Lutecium is to bring passion and vitality to what has always been the interdisciplinary work of Psychoanalysis through a
psychoanalytic training that challenges subjectivity, through a close attention paid to the Other as unconscious, the other as language,
the other as outside discourses, the other as culture. We look forward to working closely with Jacques Siboni, M.D., our Senior Training
Analyst who has been involved with us for years and who will direct all levels of our training program. Lutecium is highly appreciative of
our affiliation with Dimensions de la Psychanalyse in Paris and we look forward to further exchanges.
For anyone who interested in participating in Lutecium’s Training Program, please email us.
Sincerely,
Rebecca Bauknight, Ph.D.
President
Why a new training program? Why now?
