Dr Kate Foord
Lacanian
psychoanalyst
Melbourne

Psychoanalysis

People come to psychoanalysis for many reasons, often with a pain or difficulty from which they cannot release themselves. Psychoanalysis supposes that this has unconscious foundations. Through the work of free association, the repetitions from which someone suffers are worked through in an analysis, through speech and interpretation, and transformed.

My psychoanalytic orientation is Lacanian: that is, my theoretical base and clinical practice are drawn from the work of French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who, in his reworking of the work of Sigmund Freud, not only radically rewrote that work but in the process formulated a distinct and original practice.

Lacan designates a human being a speakingbeing. Language and how it makes a person (we could also say a speakingbody), is the basis of psychoanalytic practice. A person comes—with their repetitions, their suffering, their desire—and speaks, speaks freely, allowing what comes to mind to be said. Through listening to this speech and the interpretations it elicits, it is possible to make a new relation with, and new possiblities from, the repetitions, to free desire from its identifications and attachments, and to emerge from an analysis with more capacity to love, to act and to respond to being alive and living with others.

I chose Lacanian psychoanalysis for many reasons. It is non-normative. The analyst doesn't offer or presume to know the right way for the analysand to live. Because it doesn't elevate the analyst to an ideal or a model for life, Lacanian psychoanalysis represents an ethical approach in which each person who undertakes it has the opportunity to find, work on and transform their position in life.

I offer supervision to clinicians interested in practising with a psychoanalytic orientation.

• I am an Accredited Mental Health Social Worker and a member of the Australian Association of Social Workers. If you wish to obtain a Mental Health Treatment Plan through your GP, you will be eligible for ten rebated sessions per calendar year.