About Bita Riazati: Psychoanalyst, Psychologist & Supervisor

My name is Bita Riazati and my journey into psychoanalysis began with the transformative experience of speaking to a psychoanalyst. I was captivated by how speech, through the effects of transference first articulated by Freud, enables a working-through of loss. Living in Australia, a geographically isolated yet culturally hybrid context, I became intrigued by how societal structures and family upbringing influence the individual and one's relationships across various domains, yet are driven by forces beyond the individual and their contexts. This reveals the split subject theorised by Jacques Lacan. His concept of the subject, as fragmented and shaped by the unconscious, subverts traditional notions of coherence and autonomy, highlighting where psychoanalysis diverges from other therapies. It offers hope for understanding the subject of the unconscious and what causes desire (objet petit a).
Psychoanalysis, for me, represents a departure from traditional deterministic models. It is instead a contemporary approach to understanding the human being as a speaking subject, engaging with the unknown dimension of symbolic language that constitutes the unconscious. Grounded in Lacan’s tripartite framework of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real, it challenges the pursuit of mastery and the prescriptive advice often provided by specialists. Instead, it creates a space for the unconscious desire of the speaking being to emerge, allowing the analysand to navigate forces that constrain them in analytic treatment.