What is SPIIRAL? The Society for Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Interventions and Research After Lacan (SPIIRAL) is a nonprofit organization devoted to the development and promotion of practical and theoretical advances in psychoanalysis. Its overarching purpose is to work for the ongoing renewal of psychoanalysis in a form that is appropriate to the material situations and the singular experiences--the desires, drives, fantasies, and forms of jouissance--of human subjects (subjects of speech) in the age of cultural globalization (mondialisation) that is our own.

Which psychoanalysis? The psychoanalytic tradition we wish to extend and to adapt, as appropriate for the future of the human, from within the North American context that constitutes our most proximate surround, is the one that passes from Sigmund Freud in Vienna to Jacques Lacan in Paris, and to Willy Apollon and GIFRIC, in Quebec City. SPIIRAL is affiliated with GIFRIC (Groupe interdisciplinaire freudien de recherches et d'interventions cliniques et culturelles) as both a scion and a partner organization, like a spiral that extends out from its center and origin, but that retains this center as inspiration and model.

SPIIRAL is committed to the extension of this work of GIFRIC and of the school that GIFRIC founded in 1997, The Freudian School of Quebec (L’École freudienne du Québec)--not only in virtue of its high degree of ethical and epistemic seriousness, but above all in virtue of two of its fundamental substantive dimensions. First, this version of psychoanalysis aspires with singular rigor to place itself as much as possible outside of any determinate cultural or civilizational framework. Such a trans-civilizational position is necessary in order to do justice to the human subject in the age of cultural globalization (mondialisation), the age in which we live. This is a psychoanalysis that is driven by a concern for the human spirit as such, with a view to an open future, and that fully recognizes itself as inhabiting a time when cultures and civilizations are both intersecting with each other, and traversing subjects, to a hitherto unheard-of degree. Thus, we are pursuing a form of psychoanalysis that is decolonializing (since colonialism is questioned and eroded by mondialisation), and that aspires to be transcultural, and indeed trans-civilizational. Given this aspiration, the psychoanalysis in which we are interested is one that will attend anew, outside of given conventional (social, cultural, civilizational) frameworks (including the most “up-to-date”), to the censorship of the feminine and the masculine in their manifold constellations. Second, psychoanalysis in this tradition aspires to place itself beyond the framework of neurosis, so as to welcome the speech of subjects structured in accordance with perversion and psychosis as well, and so to open itself to the entire range of unconscious knowledge to which human subjects may be privy, and that they may produce.

In this context, psychoanalysis consists in the offer of a space where a person can finally speak of unconscious experiences that mobilize the energies of the drive, where one can give voice to sufferings, fears, and joys that have never been spoken before, where what has only been able to express itself in inexplicable symptoms can pass into speech. In a psychoanalysis one can speak of–and take the side of–acts that surprise oneself as much as others, undermining, or eliding, what the ego is supposed to want and leading the subject towards an unknown future.

To read our full vision statement, click here.