LaConference 2013 - Keynote by Dr. Paul Verhaeghe

June 2, 2013 - LaConference keynote address by Dr. Paul Verhaeghe, a senior professor at Ghent University, Belgium who holds the chair of the department for psychoanalysis and counseling psychology.
Dr Verhaeghe teaches Clinical Psychodiagnostics, Psychoanalytic therapy and Gender studies. He is an analyst in private practice, member of the NLS and the WAP. He has published eight books (5 are translated in English) and more than hundred papers. His two most recent books bring a critique on contemporary psychotherapy (see "Chronicle of a death foretold": the end of psychotherapy. Dublin, 2007. Crónica de una muerte anunciada": El final de las psicoterapias ) and on the link between contemporary society and the new disorders (see Identity in a time of loneliness. APW conference, Philadelphia, 2008. Identidad en los tiempos de la soledad)

The LaConference 2013 is a sequel of the one held in 2011 and is an initiative by the Lacan Salon to continue the dissemination of psychoanalytic theory and practice associated with the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan through a public conference, aimed at academics and non-academics in hopes to create dialogue between academics, clinicians, and community members on the applicability of Lacanian theory to contemporary social, clinical and political issues.

In 2013 the LaConference title is "Sixty years after Lacan: On the Symbolic Order in the Twenty-First Century" and gravitates around Lacan's "Rome Discourse," formally known as "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" (1953) where Lacan proposed a return to the primacy of speech and language as the fundamental and irreducible concern of psychoanalysis. In this fashion, he restated the importance of the Symbolic in the emergence of the subject's truth.

The conference explores the status of the Symbolic in contemporary discursive practices and ask, how have the terms comprising Symbolic transactions shifted? And, what are the possible consequences of this shift?