
20/06/2025
✨21st century crucial problems for psychoanalysis✨
📆Dates: July 12th, 2025
⏰10:30am – 12:30pm.
💻Online and in person
Title: Crucial challenges to the analyst’s desire
https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/crucial-challenges-to-the-analysts-desire-with-hilda-fernandez-alvarez-tickets-1380644798759
In this seminar we will discuss the clinical concerns that Lacan identified as Crucial problems for psychoanalysis, presented in Lacan’s Seminar 12 (1964-1965): identification, demand and transference. We will approach these analytic notions through Lacan’s play on topological surfaces. Topology help us to imaginarize some problems and to locate the movement of thought within the psychoanalytic act. The key to understanding the topology of these central challenges in psychoanalytic practice lies in the desire of the analyst. This Seminar will invite us to think about these clinical challenges, posed by the field of the Real on the subject’s suffering, through some vignettes that pertain to both the clinic and the culture of the 21 st century.
Dr. Hilda Fernandez-Alvarez is a Lacanian psychoanalyst based in Vancouver, Canada. She has a vast wealth of clinical experience with diverse populations in public and private settings in Mexico and Canada. She has a Master’s degree in clinical psychology from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), a Master’s degree in literature from University of British Columbia (UBC) and a PhD in Geography from Simon Fraser University (SFU). Her doctoral dissertation articulates a critique of how discourses of trauma and healing are used in public mental health institutions. She co-founded the Lacan Salon in September 2007 and is the president of Corpo Freudiano Vancouver Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, just formed last March 2025, and which emerged from the Salon. She is an associate of the SFU Institute for the Humanities and has conducted clinical seminars since October 2015. Dr. Fernandez-Alvarez speaks regularly in various psychoanalytic conferences and colloquies and her research has been published internationally and focuses on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, trauma, discourse, socio-spatial practices, love and politics. She is co-editor of Lamella, a section of the Journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society.