Sanem Guvenc

In My Teaching, Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, writes, “You occupy the place where an act pushes you, just like that…”. During my long career as a scholar and university professor, psychoanalysis became an act as such, and led me to start my psychoanalytical formation. To this day I have been actively engaged in the activities of a wider Lacanian psychoanalytic community: participating in congresses, study groups, and clinical seminars not only in Vancouver, but also in London, New York, and Paris. Since April 2023, I am acting as the co-president of Vancouver-based psychoanalytic society Lacan Salon.

In pursuing Lacanian psychoanalysis, you are beginning a journey to write your own story. There isn’t a single person whose story has not been spoken by discourses, ideologies, institutions, belief systems, and similar structures that quietly but firmly determine the contours of what a person can or cannot do. You are coming to analysis to change that, to chronicle your own narrative by speaking about what fails in your life; by talking about what causes you the biggest suffering; by expressing your difficulties, dilemmas, confusions, excitations, and passions. Psychoanalysis is a practice committed to accompanying you in your journey to find your way within the conundrums in your life.

The only thing an analyst asks you to bring with you to a session is “free-association:” saying whatever comes to the tip of your tongue without any censure. Free-association is the single most crucial element, because a psychoanalytic session is first and foremost a promise, on the part of the analyst, to hear you, the analysand, like you have never been heard before: attentively and without judgement. It is the practice of listening to the rhythm of your body as it is reflected in signifiers that you use. An analyst listens to your words, your sentences, your silences, and those only.

Office

215 — 1118 Homer Street.
Vancouver BC
Canada
V6B 6L5