The drive in Freud and Lacan: from the relations between body and language to the scientific status of psychoanalysis.

Seminar with Tiago Ravanello* 

Open event. Registration HERE

When: Saturday, October 31st, 2026 – 10 am to 1pm (Vancouver, BC)

Where: Online, Zoom.

In this session, we will return to Freud’s first considerations about the drive and its economic processes as a way of understanding the formation of symptoms and the field of sexuality. In a quick flight through Freud’s work, we will note his implication in the construction of concepts based on a certain model of science that predisposed him to processes of reduction and quantification. We will also note the elements that cause rupture in this mode of direction, especially the formulation of compulsion repetition. Finally, we will study how the “return to Freud” proposed by Lacan aims at a process of production of references other than biology or the substantialization of the self, which poses a serious challenge to a conception of drive as a circuit. For this reason, the gaze and the voice become a new material support for the drive experience, no longer around excess, but rather lack.

*Tiago Ravanello is a psychoanalyst, director of the Corpo Freudiano (Campo Grande Nucleus), postdoctoral fellow in Clinical Psychology from the University of São Paulo (USP), with a master’s and a doctoral degree in psychoanalytic theory from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), with part of his doctorate being carried out at the University of Paris-X (Nanterre) through the CAPES/PDEE program, and a psychologist from the Federal University of Santa Maria. He is currently a Full Professor at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS), where he teaches undergraduate psychology, tutors the Uniprofessional Residency Program in Clinical Psychology, and teaches in the Graduate Program in Psychology (master’s degree) at UFMS.