New School for Existential Psychoanalysis
Michael Guy Thompson, PhD, Director
Full Training in Existential Psychoanalysis
FREE ASSOCIATION, Inc., is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1988 to provide informal psychoanalytic training in San Francisco from an existential perspective, and to further the legacy of R. D. Laing. It is the only psychoanalytic salon in the U.S. that features a synthesis of existential philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Free Association organizes ongoing lectures, seminars, reading groups, salons and film presentations, virtually and in person, open to all.
Conventional analytic training favors a technical orientation while neglecting the primacy of experience. In our training, we emphasize, after Freud, those who see the clinical relationship as specifically human, who view psychopathology as a personal affair, as a matter of the heart. We believe that all analysts and students alike need to "reinvent the wheel." Like Freud, Winnicott, Bion, Laing, Lacan, we base our thinking on our experience and resourcefulness as individuals, with unique, perhaps wayward, points of view.
We question whether psychiatry or psychology are desirable foundations for cultivating a psychoanalytic perspective, free of the mind-numbing diagnostic categories that define contemporary clinical practice. Instead, we situate psychoanalysis in philosophy, emphasizing a sceptical sensibility.
Candidates are encouraged to seek the basic principles of psychoanalysis and to be flexible when encountering the evidence of those principles in their work. The practice of psychoanalysis, as well as its theory and teaching, cannot be learned from a distance, but evolves out of each clinical encounter. This is why psychoanalysis isn't simply a technique among others, but a way of coming to terms with the human condition.
Training consists in: Theoretical Seminars; Case Conferences; Individual Supervision; (and Personal Analysis if indicated).
The NEW SCHOOL FOR EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOANALYSIS began its first online training year in September 2022. We are now taking applications for our next academic year of training that will commence in September 2026. Please refer to Application & Admission to inquire further.
Training Philosophy
A Philosophical Foundation in Existential Phenomenology
Free Association Training in Existential Psychoanalysis offers a philosophical foundation in existential phenomenology, a method of inquiry that was anticipated by the Sceptics (circa: 4th century BC to 3rd century AD), and conceived in its present form at the turn of the twentieth-century by Edmund Husserl. Drawing on the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Fredrich Nietzsche, it was subsequently situated in existentialist philosophy by Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Phenomenology is a discipline that seeks to describe our experience of the world instead of explaining it by a pre-conceived scheme. From this angle, we situate Freud as a Classic, locating the origin of his thinking in Greek philosophy, literature, and myth.
The Salon Conception of Training
An Elastic, Bohemian Sensibility
Instead of creating a formal, by-the-book structure with a fixed curriculum, the psychoanalytic salon approach to training — harking back to Freud's original Wednesday group — perceives the training experience as elastic and tailored to the needs of each candidate. Because our training is not academic we adopt a laissez-faire, even bohemian, sensibility. The salon is a gathering place where seminars and lectures are unremittingly flexible and determined by what each instructor brings to the table.
"We are born into a world where alienation awaits us… the condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man."