Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis - Institutional Frame

Institutional Frame

The school first emerged in the late 1970s as a distinct intellectual group within the alternative journal Problemi. Since the mid-1960s, this journal served as the only alternative media in Slovenia where critical and dissenting opinions against the mainstream Titoist ideology could be heard. The journal thus hosted an extremely wide range of contributors, from apolitical modernist literates, civic nationalists, conservatives, liberals, social democrats up to radical Marxists, Lacanians and followers of the Frankfurt school. By the early 1980s, the tensions within the editorial board reached their height, causing the more conservative and non-Marxist contributors to publicly petition the authorities of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia to be allowed to establish their own journal. Their demands were accepted in 1981, where a new alternative journal, the Nova revija, was founded. From then on, the followers of the Ljubljana School gradually took over the journal Problemi, transforming it into the main platform of their intellectual activities.

In 1985, the journal Problemi launched the Analecta book series, publishing more than 60 monographs since, mostly translations of classical and contemporary philosophers (e.g. Spinoza, Hume, Hegel, Kant, Derrida, Lyotard and Badiou), as well as Slovene authors. In the late 1980s, the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis was founded as the central coordinating body of publishing and editorial activities of the group. The current president of the society is Slavoj Žižek.

Nevertheless, the academic activity has mostly been taking place within the University of Ljubljana and the various institutes and departments associated to it (such as the Faculty of Arts and the Institute for Sociology) and the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.