Course Title: The Clinical Lacan (12 CE credits)
Instructor: Charles Turk, M.D.
Meeting dates (2019): March 4, March 11, March 18, March 25, April 1, April 8
Meeting time: Mondays, 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Location: 30 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago
Course Description:
Generally, the works of Jacques Lacan are viewed in this country as an obscure, possibly interesting theory that is without clinical relevance. Thus, he has been largely ignored by the psychoanalytic community here and has only become known within academic departments of comparative literature, philosophy, French, feminist studies, and so on.
In response, this course will address the clinical relevance of Lacanian concepts. Specifically, the text After Lacan, by Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin, will provide the basis for a discussion of the basic concepts, which the authors illuminate with clinical examples. These three psychoanalysts of GIFRIC (The Interdisciplinary Freudian Group for Research and Clinical and Cultural Interventions) founded “388,” a comprehensive program for psychotic young adults, which has successfully restored 60% of those engaged in psychoanalysis to productive and satisfying lives.
This text derives from their accumulated clinical work with these patients, and so blends this applied work with the theory that informs it. Other references include a book by Cantin that describes the 388 program and a chapter that I authored entitled: A Lacanian view of the resolution of an impasse in: Lacanian perspectives on the theory and treatment of psychosis, London and New York: Routledge Press, Downing, D. and Mills, J. (Eds.), 2018.
Biographical Information:
Charles Turk, M.D. is Faculty and a Board Member of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis (CCP). In addition to seeing patients and supervisees in his office, Dr. Turk provides clinical work, supervision, and teaching at the “Kedzie Center,” a community mental health center in Chicago, which he had a hand in developing.
He is an analyst of GIFRIC and the Freudian School of Quebec and is the “responsible” of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Circle of the school. He received psychoanalytic training at the Center for Psychoanalytic Study in Chicago after a psychiatric residency at the Neuropsychiatric Institute of the University of Illinois.
