Youth Space

The London Society’s Youth Space is part of a response to a policy initiative introduced by Christiane Alberti, President of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, in March 2023, under the name of the “New Youth Policy”. The policy, which has since been put in place in various ways by all of the seven Schools of the WAP, outlined the need to create accelerated pathways for young people to enter the School. Such pathways have at their centre the young person’s active engagement with the School in terms of a working commitment and in return the School undertakes to provide the necessary framework for the young person’s contributions (case presentations, cartel work, etc…) to find a place within the School. Most radically, and at its fullest extension, the New Youth Policy proposed a change in the admissions policy for the Schools of the WAP, whereby a young person could – after a relatively short time – be accepted as a member on a conditional basis, while being assigned a mentor to support their development. According to the proposal, if, after a two-year probationary period, the candidate has met the conditions for their admission, they would be granted full membership. Of course, in the Lacanian Orientation, membership is not considered to be the end of one’s training, but merely a finite point in a formation that is not simply ‘continuous’, but infinite. This is what the School is: irrespective of the local conditions required to enable one to practice, it is a place to pursue an infinite formation within the Lacanian Orientation in Psychoanalysis, on the basis of one’s desire and a transference to work, according to the principles laid out by Lacan in “The Founding Act”.

Although the London Society’s Youth Space does not provide any immediate path to conditional membership, it is nevertheless inscribed within the logic of the New Youth Policy and the enthusiastic response given to it by the then President of the NLS, Daniel Roy, who, according to the unique form characterising the NLS – itself the “youngest school of the WAP” – encouraged the various Societies, Groups and Initiatives that make it up, to create “spaces in which to welcome the new: the new in the transference, the new in the group, the new in the School”. Such spaces were conceived, not as places in which instruction is meted out from on-high, but spaces organised according to a ‘horizontal’ logic, held together by a desire to be part of it, and in which the topic of work and form of work undertaken is determined by those who participate in it.

This initiative and the deployment of such “Youth Spaces” has been supported and extended by the current President of the NLS, Patricia Bosquin-Caroz.

Details of the current work of the Youth Space, suggested by its current participants, can be found in the following poster.