The 2026/2027 training and research programme focuses on the theme Foundations of Formal Metapsychology. Its aim is to show how Freud’s metapsychology, far from being a speculative apparatus or a metaphorical language, possesses the logical structure of a natural science, and as such can be expressed in a rigorous formal language endowed with the precision and generative power proper to mathematical physics.
Over recent decades the post-Freudian tradition has progressively abandoned the Freudian conception of psychoanalysis as a natural science, reducing it now to hermeneutics, now to rhetorical practice, now to a system of algebraic formalisations lacking combinatorial rules and any real fruitfulness (as in Lacanian notation). The seminar seeks to restore to metapsychology its original epistemological status, taking up the programmatic analogy with the mathematisation Maxwell performed on Faraday’s empirical discoveries: just as the language of differential equations revealed physical consequences invisible to empirical intuition, a formal language for metapsychology makes it possible to generate theoretical predictions beyond the reach of natural-language formulation alone.
The lessons thus aim to show in detail how the fundamental conceptual cores of Freudian theory — psychic space, the drive, the three points of view (topographical, economic, dynamic), the theory of the object, the opposition between Eros and Thanatos, the compulsion to repeat, repression, narcissism, transference — can receive a precise formal characterisation by means of the tools of differential geometry, conformal geometry, the theory of differential equations, and the thermodynamics of dissipative systems (Prigogine). The formal models constructed will be discussed as they arise, showing how they do not replace natural language — indispensable given the nature of the psychoanalytic object, which “speaks” — but rather guarantee its conceptual univocity, theoretical coherence, and capacity to generate new models and new directions of research.
These and other themes will be the object of a study aimed at recognising the incomparable scientific value of Freudian metapsychology and at demonstrating its full formalisability, in the spirit of Freud’s original scientific programme, together with the enormous theoretical and practical advantage that clinical psychoanalysis can draw from it in terms of conceptual univocity and methodological rigour.
The seminar is open to the public and is organised as a course of 11 lessons on a mostly fortnightly schedule, held on Saturday mornings at 10.30 at the premises of the Scuola di Psicanalisi Freudiana (Via Lentasio 7, Milan).
For more information click here.
For info and registration click here.
