Certificate in the Foundations of Psychoanalysis, Autumn 2026
About this Event
Certificate in the Foundations of Psychoanalysis (8 Weeks)
8 Thursdays: Oct 1, Oct 8, Oct 15, Oct 22, Oct 29, Nov 5, No 12, Nov 19 (19:00-20:30 Dublin-GMT)
This is a hybrid course at the FLi rooms at 18 Fitzwilliam St., Dublin 2 offering in person attendance and distance attendance for those who wish to attend remotely. In person attendance however is limited due to space, so early booking is advised. The course runs weekly for 8 consecutive weeks in Oct-Nov 2026. Open to all with an interest in delving into psychonaalytic concepts and practice. With advance readings and CPD awarded.
Note: TO REGISTER SELECT A TICKET. THAT WILL BE A TICKET FOR THE FULL COURSE OF 8 SEMINARS. FOR THOSE ATTENDING REMOTELY, THE ZOOM LINK WILL BE SENT IN DUE COURSE.
Overview
The short certificate program is an 8-week public seminar open to all with an interest in psychoanalysis. It introduces participants to the major pioneers, fundamental theories, and the relevance of psychoanalytic work in contemporary times. With accessible everyday examples, the seminars showcase how psychoanalysis shines a unique light on how we think, feel and behave as individuals and as members of groups; from our families of origin to our chosen workplaces; as well as our thoughts and opinions as members of local, national and international communities and societies. In studying unconscious processes, the defining feature of psychoanalysis, participants assess how these processes impact every aspect of our lives including love, sex, work, grief, enjoyment, dreams, and fantasies as well as our religious, political, creative and social aspirations.
With practising psychoanalysts as tutors, participants will explore what analytic listening is and through the exploration of concepts such as the unconscious, dreams, transference, repetition, group psychology, sexuality, symptoms, hysteria, obsessional neurosis, culture and the arts, participants will develop a robust understanding of the relevance and application of psychoanalysis in the 21st century. The course can be taken for general interest purposes, and it addresses practical questions in relation to training for the profession and is a gateway to further studies and training in psychoanalysis. A certificate of attendance and completion is available.
Course Fee: €350 Cert/€280 Student rate. Fees to be paid in full before the course begins.
***Advance Readings for each seminar are provided to all participants. Assessment is a short reflective essay on one of the seminar topics and is chosen by participants at the course conclusion. Due Dec 12th.
Enquiries: [email protected], [email protected]
OVERVIEW
Oct 1 - Introduction to Psychoanalysis and “Structuring” of the Subject
Oct 8 - The Unconscious in Everyday Practice
Oct 15 - Working with Dreams, the Royal Road to the Unconscious
Oct 22 - Hysteria Today in Clinical Practice
Oct 29 - Obsessional Neurosis in Clinical Practice
Nov 5 - Psychology of Groups, Organisations, and Institutions
Nov 12 - Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Film
Nov 19 - Psychoanalysis of Sexuality and Gender
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COURSE SPECIFICATION (Seminar descriptions and tutor bios below)
Oct 1 - Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Its Structuring of Neurosis & Psychosis
Description: The seminar offers insights into psychoanalytic thought beginning with an overview of the life and work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and introduces its unique delineation of psychical structure in terms of neurosis and psychosis, alongside fundamental concepts such as “the unconscious, “transference,” and the “drive” as gateways into how we think about the human psyche both clinically and in everyday life.
Tutor: Eve Watson (PhD) is involved in psychoanalytic practice, training, education, and research. She is a co-director of a busy Dublin city centre practice, and has published more than forty essays on psychoanalysis, sexuality, film, culture, and literature. Her co-edited books are Freud’s Principal Case Studies Revisited: Freudian-Lacanian Psychoanalysts Reconsider the Legacy (Routledge, 2025), Critical Essays on the Drive: Lacanian Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2024), and Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory(2017, Punctum). She is the academic director of the Freud Lacan institute (FLi), and was the Editor of Lacunae, the International Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis from 2016-2024. In 2022, she was the Erikson Scholar-in-Residence at the Austen Riggs Centre in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She was the Burns Scholar in Irish Studies at Boston College in the Fall of 2025.
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Oct 8 – The Unconscious in Everyday Practice
Description: The seminar delves into the unconscious, the backbone of psychoanalysis, and how it manifests in everyday life. As a phenomenon expressed in speech, language, action and motivation, it is remarkably varied and expressive. It is profoundly personal as well as having more general and universal aspects.
Tutor: Pauline O’Callaghan is a Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic psychotherapist and clinical supervisor with a private practice for the past twenty-five years in Dublin. For many years she taught psychoanalysis in various colleges in Dublin. She is one of the directors of FLi and is a member of the Editorial Board of Lacunae, the International for Psychoanalysis.
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Oct 15 – Dreams, the Royal Road to the Unconscious
Description: we are all intrigued by our dreams and have a sense that in spite of their strange illusiveness, there is something very important about them. What if we knew how to unlock and interpret them? This seminar takes as its starting Freud’s dream book, The Interpretation of Dreams, voted one of the most important books of the 20th century, to explore how dreams can be interpreted and are the “royal road” to the unconscious.
Tutor: Marie Walshe (MICP, MIECFT, RegPract. APPI) is a psychoanalyst, supervisor and Director of Leeson Analytic Centre, a practice in which she works with adults, children and couples. Marie has been in clinical practice for over two decades and has lectured on undergraduate and post-graduate programmes in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. She has presented clinically-oriented papers in Ireland and the UK and has published in psychoanalytic journals and in a textbook on Lacanian perspectives on child and adolescent psychoanalysis, Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Babies, Children, and Adolescents: Further Notes on the Child (Routledge, 2017).
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Oct 22 – Hysteria in Clinical Practice
Description: Psychoanalysis proffers “hysteria” as far from being outdated but with fundamental aspects that structure our everyday personality, endowing us with particular traits, mannerisms, and peculiarities. This seminar explores what these are and how they manifest ordinarily and in more pathological forms. Typical and atypical manifestations and symptoms of hysteria are considered in addition to considering how to work therapeutically with them.
Tutor: David McGrath is a psychoanalytically trained psychotherapist whose work is informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis and a longstanding interest in questions of subjectivity, desire, and the unconscious. He works in private practice and has over twenty years’ experience in adult education, delivering workshops and programmes focused on psychological development and self-enquiry. Ordained in the Kriya Yoga tradition by Roy Eugene Davis in 2011, David's broader work explores the intersections of psychoanalytic thought, contemplative practice, and the enduring question of what it means to be human.
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Oct 29 – Obsessional Neurosis and Clinical Practice
Description: Psychoanalysis proffers “obsessional neurosis” as an important mode by which the personality is structured. The psychoanalytic approach diverges from the standardisation of “OCD” by offering a more comprehensive account that situates rituals and compulsions within the overall structuring of subjectivity, as a response to the enigmatic desire of the Other. This requires that clinical practice be properly oriented to these specificities.
Tutor: Diana Gouveia has worked in clinical practice since 2021. Diana’s approach is grounded in the Freudian-Lacanian orientation which places particular importance in the role of language and the unconscious acts that frame our experience of the world. Diana has an MSc in Psychotherapy/Psychoanalysis with the School of Medicine in UCD, and holds a PhD in anthropology.
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Nov 5 – Psychology of Groups, Organisations, and Institutions
Description: The thing humans are most afraid of in a group - any kind of group - is being judged and misunderstood. In a workplace/organization context, the experience of being judged as different, less than, 'wrong' or incompetent produces overwhelming feelings of helplessness, frustration and anger. But, humans are born into a group and live out their lives in relationship to others in social worlds. It is actually through the relationships with other people, in groups, that humans get to know themselves, although this may come as a surprise to many. It is really valuable, therefore, to take the time to understand what is really going on in groups/teams/committees in organisations and to find out what is happening in the individual, and the individual-group relationship. The analysis of a group is at its most interesting when the group-as-a whole unconsciously departs from its actual task and job. We will explore the theories of the unconscious in an organisation that explain this phenomenon.
Tutor: Belinda Moller is an experienced group analyst specialising in group analytic psychotherapy and group dynamics in organisations as they impact on professional, management and leadership roles in the private and public sectors. She is currently Chairperson of the Board of the Irish Council for Psychoatherapy (ICP).
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Nov 12 – Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film
Description: When we think fiction versus science we think of something light, unserious. Contemporary scientists however such as Carlo Rovelli suggest that what we live is a fictionalised version of actual reality to which we have no access. Psychoanalysis says much the same about our subjectivity. For this reason literature and film are important points of entry to exploring the unconscious. Seminar will delve into the novella Foster and film The Quiet Girl/An Cailin Ciuin.
Olga Cox Cameron is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Dublin for the past thirty-three years. She lectured in psychoanalytic theory and also in psychoanalysis and literature at St. Vincent’s University Hospital, Dublin and Trinity College Dublin from 1991-2013. She has published numerous articles on these topics in national and international journals. She is the founder of the annual Irish Psychoanalysis and Cinema Festival, now in its 15h year. Olga has taught and published extensively on the history of madness, psychoanalytic ethics, the enigmas of desire, intersections of literature, film and psychoanalysis, the film work of David Lynch, and (forthcoming) on Lacan's seminar on identification.
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Nov 19 – Psychoanalysis of Sexuality and Gender
Description: Psychoanalysis is one of the most open and considered approaches to human sexuality and gender that sets it apart from all other disciplines. This lecture offers an introduction to Freud and Lacan’s work on sexuality and explores how for psychoanalysis sexuality is imbued with unconscious ideals, rules, expectations, fantasies, and resistance to norms. The seminar will briefly assess these phenomena which contribute to why sexuality is one of most talked about and least understood aspects of human subjectivity.
Tutor: Kevin Murphy (PhD)) is a training analyst and registered supervising analyst based in Dublin, Ireland. In his private practice, he works mainly in the area of sexuality. His doctoral research on asexuality was conducted under the supervision of Russell Grigg at Deakin University, Melbourne and was published as Asexuality and Freudian Lacanian Psychoanalysis - Towards a Theory of an Enigma (Routledge, 2023). He has presented papers at conferences and seminars in Ireland and abroad. His current area of research is focussed on Freudian and Lacanian theories of perversion in relation to child sexual abuse.
Where is it happening?
EUR 0.00 to EUR 376.37
