A non-standard Clinical Practice

The next Congress of the EuroFederation of Psychoanalysis, PIPOL8, A Non-standard Clinical Practice, will take place in Brussels during the first weekend of July 2017 and is inviting everyone to gather again, after 8 years, as is traditional. The theme represents a crucial matter for today’s clinical practice in Europe: the relationship between psychoanalysis and those standards that regulate, in different ways, its application in many countries and different fields of intervention. Psychoanalysts trained in Jacques Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller’s teachings, with practitioners oriented by psychoanalysis who are working in Institutions, are called to work together on the theme of this Congress. It is a challenge thrown down in an epoch defined by a pervasive push to a regulation of clinical practice and speaking treatments, one that threatens people’s freedom to choose a treatment and also the autonomy of clinical practitioners. Scientism on the one hand, and on the other, the tendency to make treatments conform to a standard, typical of Mental Health Institutions’ bureaucracies, present a problematic which practitioners always have to face with when they want to give, during the treatment, the right place to the speech of the subject.

Psychoanalysis and its practices are not against standards but testify to how in clinical experience we are always led to a territory beyond norms within an ethical dimension of subjective experience that comes to light in treatment where there is no possible appeal to a normative regulation or standard. This is the space in which the analytic act can be produced, or where the professional’s intervention that is not guaranteed by a standard or “guide lines” takes place in an Institution.

It is essential and useful, in this way to understand in all its value, the density involved in a non-standard clinical practice and to call for papers from different European countries on this normative universe in which we need to be oriented. At this level, each country presents a different and specific situation, so it is important with this Congress to show a geography of the psy-practices’ regulation in Europe and to collect together the experiences through which colleagues of each country have found their own way to face the norms that are regulating – with laws or guide lines – their field of intervention.

We are waiting for your short papers (not more of 3000 characters including spaces) to pursue this matter on the blog of the Congress, following the PIPOL8’s perspective.

See you soon in Brussels!

Translated by Sabrina Di Cioccio