In this presentation Dr. Rogers explicates Freud’s original invention of dream analysis, and Lacan’s elaboration of the multiple valences from signifiers coming from dreams. She shows how dreams work as turning points in a psychoanalytic clinic of neurosis- sustained by the analyst’s or therapist’s acts rather than the imagined position of a “subject supposed to know.” Dr. Rogers will identity signifiers from dreams in a flow of associations from analysands, with attention to the analyst’s or therapist’s spoken interventions and silences that punctuate the unfolding of formations from the unconscious. The presentation includes two disguised clinical cases to show the effects of work with dreams over time. The presentation is aimed at an audience familiar with dream analysis and psychoanalysis, but not necessarily familiar with a Lacanian approach.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this presentation participants will be able to:

1. Rethink how the analyst’s or therapist’s acts can lead to progress in the treatment rather than a reliance on understandable forms of interpretation
2. Have knowledge of techniques like highlighting signifiers in speech, silence, and punctuation and how these techniques can be fruitful for psychoanalytic psychotherapy
3. Reconsider techniques around dream work from a Freudian and Lacanian theoretical perspective for psychoanalytic psychotherapy

Annie Rogers, PhD

Annie G. Rogers, PhD, is a practicing psychoanalyst. She has been a member of faculties at Harvard University and latterly at Hampshire College, where she is now Professor Emerita of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Psychology. She is a supervising Analyst at the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis in Berkeley, California. Dr. Rogers has published fiction (After Words: a novel, 2024), as well as three clinical books: A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy (1995); The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma (2005); and Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis and the Enigma of Language (2016).

Chris Vanderwees, PhD, RP

Chris Vanderwees, PhD, RP is a psychoanalyst, registered psychotherapist, and clinical supervisor at St. John the Compassionate in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of On the Theory and Clinic of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (2026), On the History and Transmission of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (2024), and co-author of Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric (2023). He is also the co-editor of Philosophy After Lacan (2024) and translator of Betty Milan’s Analyzed by Lacan (2023). He is an affiliate of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and analyst of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis.