“I am not developing a psychology, a discourse about this
unreal reality, but a praxis which deserves a name: erotology.”

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various
ways; the point is to change it.”

Foucault in his History of Sexuality, a text which explicitly works the relation between history 

and sexuality, reminded us that for the ancients the ethical substance of life was accorded the term aphrodisia. Invoking aphrodisia allowed the possibility of an inquiry into the status of an ethical action when it was not encumbered by the moral prescriptions and proscriptions which have  abounded in religious teaching and its propagation of the “good” as founding the logic of existence. 

This pursuit of the “good” finds clear and prevalent expression in the clinic today in the form of the modern religion of “therapy” as it dispenses therapeutic goods in the name of a “good” whose  status as an act is governed by a therapeutic goods act. Where is psychoanalysis to be situated in  this regard? 

In 2026 the seminar will take up the question of the place of sexuality in relation to the experience of analysis. Through an examination of Wilhelm Reich’s Sex Pol and its attempt to situate the historical subject in light of an intersection/inter-sexion of Marxism and psychoanalysis, we will come to work Lacan’s proposition that psychoanalysis is an erotology as an assertion that the act in psychoanalysis runs surplus to the value of both the exchange of goods and goodness itself, as an ethical imperative. Reich’s mistaken attempt to situate sexuality in light of a Marxist materialism  will be explored with a view to distinguishing it from sexuality understood as a trembling mystery which subverts the possibility of a self-evidentiary mastery promised by the “good” with respect to history.  

Expressions of interest and detailed reading list contact: 
David Pereira
Tel: 03 9690 3515
Mob: +61 419 362 457