Psychoanalytic Studies

This is a two year part-time course. Attendance is on Wednesday afternoon/evening (2.00 – 7.45pm) over 4 semesters from early September to early May each year. The weekly contact hours (4½ hours) combine formal teaching and classroom discussion. Students on the Graduate Diploma are required to attend their own psychoanalysis with a recognised reputable psychoanalytic practitioner. All teaching is carried out in The School of Psychotherapy at St Vincent’s University Hospital, Elm Park, Dublin 4. 

Psychoanalysis is a clinical practice inaugurated by Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939).  Freud produced an extensive body of theoretical writing articulating his practice and his questions. Practitioners in the field have built on this literature ever since. The Graduate Diploma in Psychoanalytic Studies provides a clinically informed direction for the reading of this body of literature. It  benefits from attending closely to the work of the French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (1901 – 1981) and his reading of Freud’s work. While the Graduate Diploma does not require its students to begin clinical practice it is delivered by experienced practitioners in classes which include trainee psychoanalytic psychotherapists. The Graduate Diploma also requires its students to be in their own psychoanalysis as this constitutes a fundamental component in any education in the field. This is primarily due to the basic premise of Freud’s work – the existence of unconscious processes of the mind – which only the experience of psychoanalysis can hope to bring home to a student.  In this way the Graduate Diploma provides an effective entry point into the psychoanalytic field without requiring a student to train as a practitioner.

In addition to its clinical practice  psychoanalysis has had enormous influence in the articulation of the forces at work in culture . Inspired by writings of Sigmund  Freud such as the landmark ‘Civilisation and Its Discontents’ [1930] many psychoanalytic concepts have been adopted – oftentimes in questionable applications – in diverse fields of academic and artistic enquiry such as psychology,  philosophy, law, psychiatry, literary criticism, film studies, fine art, women’s studies, queer studies,  sociology, and anthropology. Undoubtedly at this point in the early 21st Century psychoanalysis stands as an unavoidable reference for any serious consideration of the fields of the mental, the social and the cultural.