Psychoanalysis Los Angeles California Extension
Santa Monica, Venice, and Los Angeles Communities
Summer Proposal 2013 : Sexual Logic – R.T.Groome: Can logic be introduced in an non-academic setting and around a non-academic topic?
Winter 2013 – Anti-Therapy II – R.T. Groome
Aug. 18, 25 2012 – Anti-Therapy I – R.T.Groome
Jan. 7,14,21 2012 – From Revolution to Involution – R.T. Groome
Aug. 6,13,20,27 2011 – Introduction To A Primitive Theory of Knots – R.T. Groome
June 4, 11, 18, 25, 2011– Seminar on Resistance – Benjamin Bishop, Mark Lovasz, & Baba Singh
2011 – Experimental Topology; A descriptive account of a conference and workshop in topology and analysis Oct. 28, 2011 in the Los Angeles for Alternatives to Biological Psychiatry: If We Don’t Medicate, What Do We Do? http://psychintegrity.org/
2011-13 Young People’s Library: this work-group opens up the oeuvre of Freud with children and their parents in a way that goes beyond the cliches and popular jargon.
2008 ARC Project: proposal for the city of Santa Monica – Lacanian analysis of Homeless Desire. (Project Sample Download ARC)
The Los Angeles Public School Presentations:
Psychoanalysis Los Angeles Extension
Statement of Position
Today, to advertise why a collective would try to do Good and progress its Cause is both naive and a cliche. From Wall Street to Student Loans, from Medical Care to the Judicial System, from Science to Religion, it has become evident that those institutions and collective efforts that were designed to do good have on any many instances not only failed, but accomplished exactly the opposite. Here, then, in the recognition of this loss of innocence we must ask:
How can a collective action be accomplished in a public forum without once again falling back into the Same ?
How can a research institute, clinic, or school determine its real effect on the individual and society beyond a platitude of expertise ?
In the urgency of doing something rather than nothing at all, how can forms of analytic professionalism and the claims to be of service to others bypass the crucial problems of the very community they are trying to help?
Recognizing the uneasiness such questions may provoke and the difficulty of responding we replace the easy mission statement with a more difficult one aimed at rethinking the effects and goals of any collective action. Our aim is not, however, one of an endless critique of the existing structures of society, but consists in a constructive dimension: a psychoanalysis in extension.
I claim to designate in the threshold of a psychoanalysis in intension the possible initiative of a new mode of access of the psychoanalyst to a collective guarantee through a critique in extension. J. Lacan, Propositions of Oct. 9
In the most habitual sense of the term, psychoanalysis in extension refers to a way of taking analysis beyond the private session – its common meaning or intension – into the public through a work in the community. In the first instance, it refers to traits of community and neighborhood in the topological sense of the term.
Topology is the discipline that comes to bear on “the traits at the origins of civilization” (Maurice Frechét)
Although the synonymy between a topological neighborhood and a communal neighborhood should not be taken for granted, neither suffice to account for the discontinuity facing a contemporary analysis of place or society. Topological neighborhoods were invented to found a calculation of continuity in the calculus of the 17–18th centuries. The term community as it is used by our politicians, social workers, sociologists, and psychologists is simply intuited or referred to as a census of people sharing the same traits and geographical neighborhood. If these traits are local, we can speak of a Polis or city-state, if they are global, we can speak of a Cosmopolis (Kant), Global Village (Mcluhan), or New World Order (Bush Senior).
Yet today, whether of mathematics or society , the place of community is not accounted for by a continuous global space: by identifying individuals of families in neighborhoods of cities of states of nations of the Cosmos. What is required is a theory of the subject and practice of a discontinuity of place that we only abbreviate here with reference to the various works in extension above and publications on topology and psychoanalysis.