PRAXIS & METHOD
At the most basic level, what I offer is similar to talk therapy - you come to talk about the problems of your life to an intent ear. More specifically, I listen very carefully to how your language structures your thoughts and desire. I don't intrude, I listen patiently, pointing out when the logic of your language betrays or enables the very aspirations you espouse or believe you want. This follows the teachings and ethics of Jacques Lacan.
What is different about my practice from traditional psychoanalysis or therapy is that I encourage the talking about ones artistic practice and life as being heavily related to ones life, and with this in mind encourage the showing of ones artwork, in documentation in sessions, sent beforehand or after, or, on certain occasions, in your studio.
As a general rule, the early stages of psychoanalytic life coaching are more conversational, similar to how most life coaches work, though do not be surprised to be challenged by existential questions related to practical issues.
The central activity of Lacanian analysis is what Freud deemed "free association", which means that you speak whatever comes to mind. Whatever the reason you may be coming - your art, your relationship, depression, lack of desire, creative struggles, relationship troubles or stress- whatever it may be, the beginnings of your own solution will begin to take form by letting your particular language be heard, but most importantly by yourself.
As for what to expect from my behavior, the practice of Lacanian analysis is incredibly flexible and dynamic, but with that comes a challenge, a challenge for he or she who comes to speak to test the limits of their thoughts and their dreams. What this comes down to is that I will often leave the answering up to you, providing assistance only when necessary in order to reveal thinking that is intertwined with anxieties and conflicts concerning the people and events in your life.
We may work face to face, we may work with you on the couch, if you must be out of town, we will work via Skype. Perhaps you believe something can be shown with artwork better than it can be said. In other words, when considering the unconscious mechanisms of your desire, expect the unexpected.
A general rule of analysis is that the analysand (a more humane and less capitalistic term for "client") comes for a session, they speak, and they pay. But in non-analysis, they also play and show. My practice is about you, but it is also about how you are embodied in your work. I do not fix mental health issues, I help you see how they are making you, your artwork, and how to use them as befits your unconscious mechanisms of desiring. I want you to show as much as you say.
I am not a mental health aid, and I find therapists to generally be too sappy and simplistic, unintellectual, consumerist bores, who often act either as patronizing stewards of authority, or essentially glorified friends, if not simply bureaucrats of the state or secretaries of big pharma. Those things I assure you I am not.
Though that is not to say I am strictly against such practices as psychotherapy or the prescribing of drugs for acute problems, but I see these practices as extremely limited in comparison to the deeply rigorous psychoanalytic theories first worked out by Freud and then put into a flexible praxis by Jacques Lacan, who before his death had thought it was more fitting for one practicing in his style to be a “non-analyst”.
COST
Lacanian analysts strongly believe that payment is an important part of the work. You pay with your time, your words, your mind, and with your money. However, payment does not necessarily need to be painful. For the most part, payment is based on your desire and the amount of money you make, within reason. As the adage goes, "you get what you pay for", usually the payment makes one work harder on their issues. Generally, charges are between $60 and $250 a session depending on income and ones desire, though exceptions are made for low income individuals on a case-by-case basis.
The number of sessions is determined by your own desire for how often you want or need to come. The time allotted to each session is variable, in line with the teaching of Jacques Lacan. Most sessions are between 40-50 minutes, though on occasion I may stop you at 20 minutes, for example, if that is what it takes to drill in the importance of something which has been spoken but failed to be truly considered. A good part of psychoanalytic coaching is tough love, though a sensitivity to the individuals' particularities always comes first.
INFLUENCES
Freud’s theories were brought up to date with modern linguistics and philosophy by Jacques Lacan, the most influential psychoanalyst in most of the world after Freud (with the United States being a glaring exception). My interests however, do not stop at Lacan. Post-Lacanians, such as Jacques-Alain Miller, Eric Laurent and others have moved the theory into the 21st century, and in addition to psychoanalytic practitioners, the work of many thinkers and psychoanalysts. Some favorites include Wittgenstein, Foucault, Kierkegaard, Zizek, Winnicott, RD Laing, as well as art theorists such as Adorno, Arthur Danto, Hal Foster, Michael Fried, Richard Wollheim, Alva Noe, and artists such as Duchamp, Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Sophie Calle, Martha Rosler, John Baldessari, and of course, my artistic mentor Christian Boltanski who all inform my work and praxis in relationship to life and love, contemporary identity, gender theory, psychology, technique and scientific progress.
My practice does quite strictly adhere to psychoanalytic ethics and principles, however it was Lacan who showed just how unorthodox these strict ethics can, and must be. With that said, I do not call what I do therapy, and it really cant be said to be therapy either, rather, it is the uncovering of the psychical processes that your art reveals, but you may not yet know yourself. As for ethics, I follow all necessities any therapist would, such as confidentiality and discretion, but for psychoanalysis as Lacan shows us, ethics is always a question of your subjective and unique unconscious strategies, that is to say - your desire.
GUIDING PRINCIPLES/ETHICS
"Marx aspires to the creation of a State where, as he puts it, human emancipation will be not only political but real, a State where man will find himself in a non-alienated relation to his own organization. Now you know that, in spite of the openings that history has given to the direction pointed to by Marx, we don't seem to have produced integral man yet. On this road, Freud shows us - and it is in this sense that he doesn't go beyond Marx - that, however far the articulation of the problem has been taken by the tradition of classical philosophy, the two terms of reason and of need are insufficient to permit an understanding of the domain involved when it is a question of human self-realization. it is in the structure itself that we come up against a certain difficulty, which is nothing less than the function of desire"
-Lacan, May 4th, 1960. During his seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis." p. 208.
