Group title:  Consultation/study group on the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis

Group leader:  Charles Turk, MD

Meeting dates:  Alternate Mondays, beginning September 12

Meeting time:  7:00 – 8:30 p.m.

Group description:

Those of you who have attempted the difficult and demanding work of treating very disturbed people are invited to join a study group on the treatment of psychosis.  Here you may bring in your own cases to further a discussion of the application of psychoanalytic principles to the treatment of psychosis. 

Over the years psychoanalytic treatment has been deemed by many to be contraindicated for psychotic individuals.   Nevertheless, there is a rich tradition, beginning with Freud, of efforts to work psychoanalytically with psychotic patients.  Of the many who have devoted themselves to this, a group of Lacanian analysts developed a successful treatment program for psychotic young adults in Quebec City.  It is known as “388,” the street address of a beautiful mansion that houses the treatment program, and 90% of those treated there psychoanalytically have resolved their delusions; they no longer live in terms of them and have obtained satisfying places in society.  Dr. Turk will weave the principles developed at 388 into discussions of cases that he and group members bring to investigate and share.

About the leader:

Charles Turk, MD  is a practicing psychiatrist/psychoanalyst and a faculty and board member of CCP.  He received psychoanalytic training at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Chicago and is also a psychoanalyst of GIFRIC (Interdisciplinary Freudian Group for Research into Clinical and Cultural Intervention) in Quebec City, where he has attended yearly seminars since 1996.  He is responsible for the Chicago Psychoanalytic Circle of GIFRIC’s Ecole Freudienne du Quebec.  

Dr. Turk has had a longstanding interest in the psychoanalytic treatment of severely disturbed individuals, in both office practice and in the public sector.  He served as psychiatric consultant to a partial hospitalization program at the Kenneth Young Center in Elk Grove Village for 12 years.  In 2012 he became a member of the board that founded the Kedzie Center – the first taxpayer funded community mental health center in Chicago.  There he has made presentations on the psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis, and similar presentations to Turning Point and through CCP.  He now serves on the Kedzie Center board and volunteers there doing direct clinical service, consultation, and a biweekly continuous case conference.