Jean Laplanche has had major impact around the globe in the last two decades as his writings have been translated in to English and are widely available. His work is serving to deepen and to illuminate Freud’s opus, with significant clinical, academic and social implications. Many psychoanalytic training institutes have yet to catch up to this powerful trend, and so many analysts do no have much familiarity with his work, but are typically stunned by its profundity when they do begin to read.

‘Reading Jean Laplanche’ is a course intended for curious mental health workers, therapists and others, students of human motivation, and anyone curious about an in-depth way of comprehending the complexity of being human. Laplanche’s writings are having major impact on psychoanalytic understandings of human sexuality, gender, otherness, and the experience of the uncanny. Participants in this course will have a solid overview of this important thinker’s comprehensive theories of the structuring of the mind also.

Learning Objectives:

1. Expansion of one’s comprehension of how humans are motivated to behave as they do.
2. New understanding of how the mind develops into its broad structures of ego, superego, id and conscience.
3. Therapists will be given new ways of thinking about what they hear in the clinic along with alternative ways of understanding how they might respond and why it can make a difference.

Stephen Fowler, MD, FIPA

Stephen Fowler, MD, FIPA is a psychoanalyst retired from private practice in Mississauga, who has a strong interest in intersections of psychoanalysis with religious faith, particularly seeking to explore the implications of the meta-psychology of Jean Laplanche for psychotherapy and Christianity.