A place for
the unsaid.
Psychoanalytic practice, research, writing, and teaching in the Freudian and Lacanian traditions.
What speaking can change
The symptom is already a treatment through speech.
It is often the case that our best intentions for ourselves, and even our deepest understanding of ourselves, do not alleviate a persistent sense of suffering. It accompanies us like a partner, sometimes feeling more like part of who we are than a problem to get rid of.
Psychoanalysis makes room for a mode of speaking that does not demand mastery over what is said. It makes room for the unconscious to speak through us, and for what makes itself heard beyond what we intend to say.
The idea is that, when listened to carefully, this mode of speaking can lead to changes that a conscious decision or intellectual insight alone cannot bring about.
About Leon Brenner
About Leon Brenner
Between the clinic
& the world.
I am a psychoanalytic practitioner, theorist, and writer based in Berlin. My work concerns subjectivity, language, the body, and the relationship between culture and psychopathology.
I teach psychoanalysis in the MA Clinical Psychology track at the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin and am the founder of Unconscious Berlin.
Biography & professional backgroundFrom the archive
Selected writing
When Reflection Does Not Implicate
In analytic work one often encounters subjects who speak with ease. They reflect, explain, analyse, and articulate their condition with clarity. They can recount their history, describe their relations to others, and situate their difficulties…
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Sorry, Baby (2025): Film Analysis
Sorry, Baby is a rigorous meditation on trauma, subjectivity, and the unstable aftermath of sexual violence. Rather than reducing trauma to a single event, I argue that the film locates the traumatic in the subject’s…
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How Books Taught Me to Be Human: Book Recommendations from an Autistic Reader
What can books teach us about being human? In this thoughtful interview, Olivia, an autistic reader, shares her top book recommendations and the insights they’ve given her about life, relationships, and self-reflection.
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Palgrave Macmillan · 2020
The Autistic Subject
On the Threshold of Language
What changes when autism is approached as a singular mode of being? A Lacanian account of autistic subjectivity through language, the body, and others.
Lectures & encounters
Talks & events
Eve Watson in Berlin
Guest lecture · Organized by Leon Brenner
5 November · 19:00 CET · In person and online
Teaching & conversations
Follow a thread.
My teaching moves between psychoanalytic theory and questions in clinical practice, philosophy, and culture. I welcome invitations from universities, institutes, and reading groups.