Derek Hook, PhD
Lacanian diagnostic structures in relation to clinical techniques
December 13-14, 2025
Kinzie Hotel
20 West Kinzie Street, Chicago
& ZOOM
Derek Hook is a Professor in Psychology and a clinical supervisor at Duquesne University. A scholar and practitioner of psychoanalysis, he is one of the editors (along with Calum Neill) of the Palgrave Lacan Series and of the four-volume Reading Lacan's Ecrits (with Calum Neill and Stijn Vanheule). He began his analytical training in London, at the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research. He is the author of Six Moments in Lacan and the co-editor of Lacan on Depression and Melancholia, in addition to papers on various facets of the clinical and cultural dimensions of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. He maintains a YouTube channel with many lectures on Lacanian Psychoanalysis.
Seminar Title: Lacanian diagnostic structures in relation to clinical techniques
Seminar Description: The Lacanian clinical domain is well known for its three basic diagnostic structures (neurosis, psychosis, perversion). For many psychoanalytic practitioners, this is a very minimal diagnostic system, especially given its apparent exclusion of factors such as narcissism, depression, and borderline, etc. as key diagnostic indicators. This seminar aims to explore each of these diagnostic structures, viewing them less as categorical designations than as subjective structures, each of which relies upon a distinct mode of defense (repression, foreclosure, disavowal) which will, of course, necessarily characterizes the transference relationship. A key qualification here concerns the structural nature of such diagnostic designations (neurosis, psychosis, perversion), which means that symptoms alone are not enough to make a diagnosis. A structural approach seeks to locate patients in respect of the experience subjective/social meaning (typically as linked to questions of desire), the localization of jouissance (libidinal intensity), and the relation to the (symbolic) Other.
Lacanian diagnostic structures are a crucial means of specifying and directing a treatment (as opposed to objectifying/categorizing patients), a fact which helps explain why Lacanian treatment approaches to neurosis and psychosis are so different. What then are the Lacanian clinical techniques that pertain to neurosis (i.e. to obsessional neurosis, hysteria), psychosis (paranoia, schizophrenia, melancholia, and ‘ordinary psychosis’, etc.), and perversion? This seminar will introduce and develop a series of key Lacanian/Freudian concepts – desire, the Name-of-the-Father, the three registers (Imaginary/Symbolic/Real ), jouissance, phallus, etc. – as a way both of differentiating the above subjective structures and highlighting which Lacanian techniques and interventions (punctuation, scansion, ‘hystericization’, oracular and ‘non-meaningful’ interpretation, ‘secretarial work’, etc.) are, accordingly, most relevant.
Readings:
Fink, B. (1999). A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fink, B. (2007). Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners. Norton.
Hook, D. (2016). Six Moments in Lacan. Routledge.
Hook, D. (2023). On the role of speech in psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association. 71(5), 855-881.
Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits (Translated by B. Fink). Norton. (selected papers to be read in conjunction with the Reading Lacan’s Écrits series, edited by Hook, Neill and Vanheule (Routledge)).
Leader, D. (2011). What is Madness? Penguin.
Nobus. D. (2000). Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis. Routledge.
Nobus, D. (2018). The logical time of diagnosis: terms and conditions of the symptom in the Lacanian tradition. In L. Bailly, D. Lichtenstein and S. Bailly (Eds.) The Lacan Tradition. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 137-154.
Vanheue, S. (2024). Why Psychosis is not so Crazy. Penguin.
Verhaeghe, P. (2020). Being Normal and Other Disorders. Other Press