The Forum of Aotearoa New Zealand is part of the International of Forums - School of the Forums of Psychoanalysis in the Lacanian Field (IF-SFPLF), which was created in 2001 with the objective of offering a new institutional alternative to a model where the identification of an idealized image, incarnated by the person of a teacher/master, prevails.

The main purpose for the Forums is to support a School of psychoanalysis which will guarantee the study of psychoanalysis and orient its practice. The forums insure the existence and effects of analytic discourse, by maintaining links with health care institutions, with social and political practices that confront the symptoms of our time, and with other theoretical practices (science, philosophy, art and religion) that imply the subject.

The aims of the Forums and the School are inscribed in the foundational act of the School of Jacques Lacan, oriented by the teachings of Sigmund Freud.

A Forum needs to contribute to the presence and maintenance of the psychoanalytic discourse. The Forums are not Schools and they do not provide any analytical guarantee in terms of a formal training. Jacques Lacan wrote “I have never spoken about analytic formation. I have spoken about the formations of the unconscious”.

A Forum provides a space for discussion, reflection and research on questions pertaining to the psychoanalytic theory and practice, and to the question of transmission in the psychoanalytic field, which is always to be re-interrogated.

The Forum of Aotearoa New Zealand offers a space where plurality and a multiplicity of discourses are welcome. Membership of the Forum is distinct from membership of the School which represents its own desire.