Lacanian Psychoanalysis in ireland

Cormac Gallagher RIP

It is with deep sadness that I write with the news of the death on 1st October of Cormac Gallagher (1938 – 2026).

It is with deep respect and gratitude that we acknowledge his ground-breaking work which has provided those of us here in Ireland who choose with a way into the Underworld, Acheron.

His encounter with psychoanalysis in 1970 in Paris had him engage in his own analysis (for “the guts of 40 years” he told us); introduce Lacan’s work into Ireland, teach, practise, launch The School of Psychotherapy in SVUH (TSOP) with Dr. Mary Darby and Prof. Noel Walsh, inspire the psychoanalytic programmes in LSB College (latterly DBS), launch the Irish School for Lacanian Psychoanalysis (ISLP) as well as The Letter Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis. He has provided the otherwise benighted English-speaking world with an extra-ordinary resource of reliable psychoanaltically-informed translations providing access to the teaching of Jacques Lacan – lacaninireland.com

Cormac’s death is a great loss. His life has ended but his work will live on. It stands to those of us in the psychoanalytic field to work to be true to it.

Should you wish to send written condolences digitally, please use the condolences page on the rip.ie link.

Ní bheidh a leithéid ann arís, cinnte.
Yours sincerely,
Barry O’Donnell

ISLP follows Jacques Lacan’s proposal for a psychoanalytic school in his 1964 Founding Act whereby “… a work is to be accomplished – which, in the field Freud has opened up, restores the cutting ploughshare of its truth – which brings the original praxis that he instituted under the name of psychoanalysis back to the duty that that is incumbent on it in our world – which, by an assiduous criticism, exposes the deviations and compromises that deaden its progress by degrading its use.”

ISLP employs a circular structure for practitioners and students in the Freudian and Lacanian field to carry out scholarly psychoanalytic work. Since its launch in 2007, ISLP cartels have been fertile ground for the production of fruitful contributions to the psychoanalytic discourse in Ireland.

Jacques Lacan’s three seminal papers from 1964 on the structure of a psychoanalytic school are ‘Founding Act’, ‘Adjunct’ and ‘Preamble’. These have been translated by Cormac Gallagher and are available to download on lacaninireland.com

In addition to Lacan’s texts, papers by members of ISLP are published in The Letter Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

Further information regarding psychoanalytic training and the formation of the psychoanalyst may be obtained at The School of Psychotherapy website.