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The journal Recherches en psychanalyse. Research in Psychoanalysis was founded by the Doctoral School “Recherches en psychanalyse” of the Université Paris-Diderot, and is now hosted by the CRPMS laboratory (Centre de Recherches Psychanalyse, Médecine et Société).

It addresses the question of teaching psychoanalysis at university, and the relation between psychoanalysis, knowledge and the “knowledge of the unconscious”. In addition to discussing psychoanalytic research, and research in and on psychoanalysis, its aim is to question various subjective, social and political issues shaken up by psychoanalysis, considered both as the agent and object of deconstructive analysis. Hence, the journal promotes critical thought from the perspective of psychoanalysis, but also applied to psychoanalysis, which cannot escape its own critical interrogations. The clinical and theoretical research published by the journal follows the decentred take psychoanalysis has on subjective and collective issues.

Since Freud considered that manifold disciplines (medicine, psychiatry, psychology, history, philosophy, literature, anthropology, mythology) were likely to host the teaching of psychoanalysis at university, interdisciplinarity proves quite fundamental to the transmission of psychoanalysis and to its position in the contemporary world. As a matter of fact, any discipline, in order to make a paradoxical history of its own archive, an analysis of its contemporary practices and discursive formations, needs to dissociate from, be discrepant with and external to its own discourse, and open up to other discourses. Such interdisciplinarity makes it possible to question the epistemological foundations of psychoanalysis, sciences and humanities. The journal aims to contribute to interdisciplinary scientific dialogue, with clinical and academic articles centred on psychoanalysis, but also on its interactions with other disciplines and epistemologies. These contributions may raise the questions of the role of theory in psychoanalysis, its historicity, its link to clinical experience, and the different epistemologies it involves. The journal thus aims to build a space for exchange and dialogue between different academic and non-academic works that engage in scientific disputatio. It promotes a political conception of psychoanalysis, acknowledging that the subject and the subject of the unconscious are embedded in the power relations of the Polis, but also that psychoanalytic practice or theorisation can have effects on norms.

Twice a year, the journal publishes original articles, essays, interviews, conference and congress proceedings, and book analyses, written in French, English, and, since 2021, in Portuguese and Spanish. These works may include specific studies of psychoanalytic texts, speculations on psychic singularity, on cure mechanisms and their theoretical elaborations, works on the history and historicity of psychoanalysis, studies on institutions, norms, psychoanalysis’ standpoint in the public sphere, its links with other discourses, reviews of literature, interviews, and dialogues between specialists from various disciplines.