Book Launch with Aurelie Pfauwadel
Date: Saturday 24/10/2026
Time: 2pm
Medium: Online (Zoom)
Cost: Free & Open to All
Book your place: register@iclo-nls.org
Queries: info@iclo-nls.org
Lacan Versus Foucault: Psychoanalysis on the Other Side of Norms (*)
This book has its origins in a discrepancy, a discordance. I began a Lacanian analysis at a very young age, the same time that I entered higher education, which led me to become a teacher of philosophy. I felt at once a fascination and a true unease when I read Michel Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge. The theses he developed on psychoanalysis, which he portrayed as an intrinsically normalising practice, did not correspond at all to the experience I had of it on the couch.
It was this gap between my experience as an analysand and my reading of Foucault that made me want to “respond” to him from Lacan’s point of view. Lacan had endeavoured to think of the conditions of possibility of psychoanalysis as a non-normalising discourse and as a practice outside norms. As the question of norms, and their consequences, surrounds the social and political movements of our world today, this is what I have set out to demonstrate: Lacan resolutely situated psychoanalysis on the “other side of norms.” — A.P.
Aurélie Pfauwadel is a psychoanalyst, professor, doctor of philosophy, the Director of the Department of Psychoanalysis at Paris-8 Saint-Denis University, and a member of the École de la Cause freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis.