Slovenian psychoanalyst and philosopher, Nina Krajnik, is the founder of the Slovenian Association of Lacanian Psychanalysis and the Achéron Institute of Ljubljana.

A decade after founding the Slovenian Association for Lacanian Psychoanalysis, how would you assess the state of psychoanalysis in Slovenia?

Nina Krajnic: When we spoke for The Times of Israel ten years ago, the Association was paving the way for the first Lacanian psychoanalytic practice while enduring a series of obstructions from the Slovenian academic establishment, media censorship, and political defamation. The beginning was difficult, marked by symptoms rooted in Slovenia’s socio-political past. Despite this, within ten years the Association flourished and became an international psychoanalytic School, particularly focused on the clinic of war trauma. It inspired me to inaugurate Lacanian psychoanalysis also in the Western Balkans by opening the first Lacanian practice in Serbia and launching a formation program for participants from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Croatia.

The most favorable reception was in Belgrade, which is not surprising. Serbia had a tradition of psychoanalysis before it was prohibited as a “Jewish practice” and later, during socialist Yugoslavia, as a “Western practice.” Nevertheless, Slovenia is now also home to an annual seminar in which I had the pleasure of hosting world-renowned lecturers and of a vibrant publishing activity. Looking back, it is exactly as Dickens wrote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” This path has shaped me in a way I could never have imagined. So today it turns out, as Freud once said, that retrospectively it is precisely those years of struggle that I find most beautiful.

In retrospect, were the early conflicts around the “signifier Lacan” fundamentally about theory, institutional legitimacy, or power? How do you view Slavoj Žižek’s intellectual trajectory today in relation to psychoanalysis?

Nina Krajnic: Žižek’s use of the signifier Lacan is, in fact, at the core of the Slovenian capitalist privatization of public property, which started in the 1990s, after the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia. This privatization created a vast social inequality because it divided people into those who in a time of transition won the privatization process and those who lost it — or, in other words, into those who came to control public funds and institutions for their own agendas and those who were reduced to second-rate citizens. Since we are talking about a figure who is internationally known as a Marxist and psychoanalyst, while in Slovenia he is a representative of capital grounded in the privatization of public property who never engaged in psychoanalytic practice, it is important to address how this historically came to be.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a central question in Slovenia........

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