Courses
Bareback Psychoanalysis: Chemsex, Queer Limit Experiences, and Other Ways of Not Playing Safe In- and Outside of Psychoanalysis
3 sessions |
Antonis Poulios
Please note that registration in this course, requires an application.
Bareback Psychoanalysis: Chemsex, Queer Limit Experiences, and Other Ways of Not Playing Safe In- and Outside of Psychoanalysis
3 sessions | Antonis Poulios
Language: English
This course approaches chemsex (the intentional sexualised use of certain psychoactive substances among gay, bi, other men who have sex with men, trans, non-binary and queer people to enhance and prolong the sexual experience) as a practice, a culture, and, above all, a privileged object of psychoanalytic inquiry. It is not only a question of how psychoanalysis can “understand” chemsex, but what psychoanalysis, through its encounter with it, might be compelled to unlearn and relearn. Chemsex, barebacking, and queer subjectivities are conceptualized as limit experiences that both expose and reconfigure the psychoanalytic field, demanding that analysis be taught through queer peoples’ experiences rather than recruited to gentrify them. After introducing basics regarding chemsex and its mindset, we will discuss the dangers it entails and ways to deal with them. Drawing on Lacan, Winnicott, Laplanche, Aulagnier, Zaltzman, Olievenstein, Saketopoulou, and contemporary queer and critical clinical work, we will also track the ways these queer limit experiences may give degrees of freedom to agency, community, and forms of aliveness that exceed normative psychoanalytic narrative – often, per Saketopoulou, through revisitations of trauma and the overwhelm they incite. Participants will be invited to consider how limit consent, traumatophilic revisitations, and psychic figurability bear on thinking about such queer analysands whose practices are messy, stigmatized, and politically charged. While this is an introductory-level course (requiring training and supervision for actual practice), the materials discussed will offer plenty of opportunities for students to reflect on how implanted enigma, intromissive gender messages (“boys don’t cry”), HIV-era homophobia, and neoliberal health discourses saturate both queer life and analysts’ countertransference.
Schedule:
- November 1, 2026
- November 8, 2026
- November 15, 2026
Erotics of the act: when the sexual unconscious contests violence
3 sessions |
Carolina Besoain
Erotics of the act: when the sexual unconscious contests violence
3 sessions | Carolina Besoain
Language: English
How do we practice psychoanalysis when our theories are inevitably compromised by the violence of the patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist world that formulated them, and when they are not helping us think and work with what exists? In this course, we will open a space for psychopolitical thought on erotics of the act—that is, the field that opens up when, propelled by the force of the sexual unconscious, we stop trying to make meaning of violence and instead respond with actions that interrupt it. We will seek a psychoanalytic approach that pays attention to the psycho-material operations driven by the sexual unconscious in order to respond to the fascist violence that is on the rise. Throughout the course we will work with three objects: Latin American anticolonial feminist activisms, dreams about Palestine, and certain act-writing processes —understood as phenomena that, arising from the failure of symbolization processes, open an erotic path of responses to fascist violence. To address this, the course will put in motion an experimental space of “collision” between traditions. We will draw both on tools from psychoanalytic thought on the erotics of destruction and unbinding (Spielrein, Laplanche, Fanon, Saketopoulou) and on tools coming from indigenous American epistemologies (Rivera Cusicanqui, Kopenawa, Catrileo, and Pinda).
Schedule:
- November 29, 2026
- December 6, 2026
- December 13, 2026