Certificate in the Foundations of Psychoanalysis, Spring 2026

This is a hybrid course at the FLi rooms at 18 Fitzwilliam St., Dublin 2 offering both 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 weeks in February and March 2026.

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.

***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.

Course Fee: €320 Cert/€260 Student rate. Fees to be paid in full before the course begins.

Enquiries: coursedirector@freudlacaninstitute.com

OVERVIEW (Detailed seminar descriptions and tutor bios are below)

Feb 5 - Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Its Structuring of Neurosis & Psychosis

Feb12 - The Unconscious in Everyday Practice

Feb 19 - Working with Dreams, the Royal Road to the Unconscious

Feb 26th - Hysteria and Obsessional Neurosis in Clinical Practice

Mar 5th - Psychology of Groups, Organisations, and Institutions

Mar 12th - Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Film

Mar 19th - Psychoanalysis, Trauma, Adverse Childhood Experiences

Mar 26th - Psychoanalysis of Sexuality and Gender

Spring 2026 COURSE SPECIFICATION (Seminar descriptions and tutor bios below)

Feb 5th - 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 numerous essays on psychoanalysis, sexuality, film, culture, and literature. Her co-edited books are Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory (2017, Punctum), Critical Essays on the Drive: Lacanian Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2024), Freud’s Principal Case Studies Revisited: Freudian-Lacanian Psychoanalysts Reconsider the Legacy (Routledge, 2025). 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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Feb 12th – 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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Feb 19th – 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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Feb 26th – Hysteria and Obsessional Neurosis in Clinical Practice

Description: Psychoanalysis proffers “hysteria” and “obsessional neurosis” as far from being outdated but 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 and obsessionality are considered in addition to considering how to work therapuetically with them.

Tutor: Alan Corcoran is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Dubin. A graduate of Independent College Dublin, he holds a clinical masters in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. He has given talks at seminars and conferences on a number of philosophical and psychoanalytic themes.

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Mar 5th – 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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Mar 12th – 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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Mar 19th – Psychoanalysis, Trauma, Adverse Childhood Experiences

Description::The ramifications of trauma are often why people seek psychotherapy. But what exactly is “trauma” and what is traumatic? How exactly does psychoanalysis approach trauma, understand it, and work with it? This invaluable seminar explores the role of trauma in childhood and its adverse effects later in life.

Tutor: Geraldine McLoughlin a professional psychoanalytic psychotherapist with a core background in clinical and counselling psychology with considerable experience in working with adults and adolescents with a history of childhood abuse and neglect. She has provided significant training to health care practitioners and legal personnel on the effects of child abuse and trauma, and is engaged in research on trans-generational trauma linked to her LLM in International Human Rights Law where she researched transitional justice mechanisms following disclosures of human rights abuses with a particular focus on children who were abused within residential settings. My research also includes working on the application of restorative justice mechanisms and the development of an understanding of “perpetrator paradigms.”

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Mar 26th – 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: 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 numerous essays on psychoanalysis, sexuality, film, culture, and literature. Her co-edited books are Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory (2017, Punctum), Critical Essays on the Drive: Lacanian Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2024), Freud’s Principal Case Studies Revisited: Freudian-Lacanian Psychoanalysts Reconsider the Legacy (Routledge, 2025). 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.