The Analytic Forum is an international organisation dedicated to the study, transmission, and development of psychoanalysis as both a clinical practice and an intellectual tradition.

We believe psychoanalysis offers the means for a profound understanding—and, beyond understanding, transformation—of human subjectivity. Yet its development has also been accompanied by tendencies that have, at times, diminished its intellectual and clinical vitality: institutional fragmentation, sectarian loyalties, excessive professionalisation, medicalisation, obscurantism, and an increasing separation from the humanities.

The Analytic Forum exists, in part, as a response to this situation. We seek to reconnect psychoanalysis with the wider intellectual culture of which it has always formed a part, fostering rigorous dialogue across psychoanalytic traditions and sustained engagement with philosophy, literature, history, politics, film, and the arts.

Our teaching proceeds principally from the Freudian-Lacanian tradition, which we regard as an exceptionally rich framework for both clinical practice and theoretical inquiry. At the same time, we do not regard any tradition as closed, complete, or beyond criticism. Fidelity to an inheritance does not demand unquestioning acceptance, but rather the willingness to think with it, through it, and, where necessary, beyond it.

We understand psychoanalytic education not simply as the acquisition of knowledge, but as an ongoing process of personal formation. Our courses aim to be in-depth while remaining accessible. But we also seek to cultivate habits of careful reading, thoughtful discussion, and critical independence in our students, while supporting clinicians in becoming more attentive listeners, more discerning interpreters of the clinical encounter, and more inventive and dynamic in their interventions.

We hold that effective psychoanalytic practice depends not only upon theoretical knowledge or technical competence, but also upon breadth of culture, depth of experience, sound judgement, sensitivity, imagination, and the capacity to respond creatively to the singularity of each clinical encounter.

We also believe that psychoanalytic thinking should not be confined to those undertaking formal analytic training. Clinicians from a wide range of therapeutic backgrounds can benefit from engaging seriously with psychoanalytic ideas, and we are committed to making those ideas available without compromising their complexity. Whether participants seek to enrich an existing clinical practice or to pursue psychoanalysis more fully, we aim to provide a welcoming and inspiring environment in which that work can begin and continue.

Above all, we believe that psychoanalysis remains a living search for truth: one that refuses easy answers, settled doctrines, and the comfort of certainty. Such a search demands intellectual courage, genuine curiosity, and a willingness to remain open to whatever clinical experience and careful inquiry may reveal.