Our Purpose and Approach
Echoes is a space for research, learning, and dialogue at the intersection of psychoanalysis, art, and literature. Here, artistic and literary works offer opportunities to reflect on human experience—from desire, dreams, and the body to loss, identity, migration, and our relationships with others. Our aim is to connect theoretical ideas, lived experience, and artistic creation in ways that open up new questions.
Research, Writing, and Translation
Through articles, essays, and translations, we provide a space for study and the exchange of ideas. We focus on close readings of works and concepts, asking questions, and exploring the relationship between psychoanalysis and artistic, cultural, and social issues.
Learning and Reflection
Echoes workshops, courses, and reading groups bring theoretical study together with encounters with artworks, discussion, and personal reflection. These programmes are designed for artists, psychoanalytic practitioners, psychologists, and anyone interested in art and human experience.
Art and Research Projects
Through collaborative projects, we create opportunities for exploration, writing, and creative practice. In these projects, images, narratives, and individual and collective experiences serve as starting points for exploring memory, the body, belonging, loss, and migration.
Dialogue and Collaboration
Echoes brings artists, therapists, writers, and researchers together to connect and collaborate. Through gatherings and interdisciplinary collaborations, we aim to create a space for sharing experiences and developing shared questions.
At the heart of these activities is an attention to the complexity and uniqueness of each person’s experience.
Echoes is an invitation to look, listen, and read more closely, and to reflect on what art and language reveal about our individual and social lives.
Shima Gholamrezaei
I am Shima Gholamrezaei, a psychotherapist working within the Freudian–Lacanian tradition and the founder of Echoes Arts and Culture Institute. I hold a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of Tehran and have more than a decade of experience in psychotherapy. My psychoanalytic formation began in 2014 and continues through personal analysis, clinical supervision, study, and participation in seminars and reading groups.
In my clinical work, I attend to each person’s unique way of speaking about suffering, desire, relationships, and lived experience. For me, psychoanalysis offers a space for listening and exploring questions that emerge through recurring patterns, conflicts, and experiences that are difficult to put into words. …
Alongside my clinical practice, I write, teach, and pursue research at the intersection of psychoanalysis, art, and literature. My central interest is in how images, language, and narrative shape human experience, and how artistic works open ways of thinking about the body, identity, loss, and migration.. In the “Painting and Psyche” workshop, I explore these questions through encounters with paintings and dialogue with participants.
Echoes grew out of this interest: a space that connects theoretical knowledge with lived experience and brings artists, psychoanalytic practitioners, researchers, and interested participants into conversation. Through workshops, articles, translations, and collaborative projects, I aim to encourage new ways of seeing, reading, and thinking.
I am currently based in Zurich and continue my psychoanalytic formation through engagement with international psychoanalytic communities.
I participate in the Programme of Continuing Studies at the Freudian Lacanian Institute (FLI) in Dublin and am a member of the International Forums of the Lacanian Field (IF‑EPFCL), the New Lacanian School (NLS), and Lacan Toronto.
Seminars, reading groups, and clinical discussions within these communities are an ongoing part of my training and research.
