April: SPS Monthly Roundup

Here's the TL;DR

• Trainee Case Conference on Tuesday, 4/8 at 6:15 PM
• Wine, Cheese, & the Lacanian Clinic, 4/18 at 6:00 PM

👇 Keep reading for more details about how to get involved during April

Tuesday, 4/8 | Trainee Case Conference

We are happy to continue our interdisciplinary psychoanalytic case conference open to all trainees in mental health in the Sacramento area. This case conference takes place at Thor Cornelius' office every second Tuesday of the month at 6:15 PM. Trainees at all years of graduate programs are welcome to attend.

The case conference hosted by Drs. Thor Cornelius, MD and Barbara Fattig, MD will be discussion-based and focused on thinking together from primarily modern psychoanalytic perspectives (though additional perspectives are welcome). If you are interested in presenting at the conference, please email Drs. Cornelius or Fattig so that we can briefly discuss the case with you and help you to prepare (i.e. providing guidance to be sure the case material is adequately anonymized prior to the presentation, etc).

Friday, 4/18 | Wine, Cheese, & the Lacanian Clinic with Nathan Lupo, LMFT

Join us for another Wine & Cheese event where board member Nathan Lupo will present on the Lacanian clinic. Gather at 6:00 PM on April 18th to drink wine, have some light snacks, and talk with local colleagues, then enjoy an engaging presentation and discussion. The event costs $25 (but only $10 for students!)

Psychoanalysis has undergone many revisions since Freud. So many, in fact, that Freud is now considered almost an afterthought, his work a distasteful hump to get over in one’s analytic training. He is criticized for being authoritarian, patriarchal, a blank screen who offers his patients not well being but “common unhappiness.”

Jacques Lacan cautioned against this approach. Post-Freudians, in Lacan’s view, had diluted Freud’s work to favor a psychology that privileged the ego and the identification of the subject with the therapist’s cultural ideals. Throughout his career, Lacan upheld the Freudian unconscious and made theoretical contributions such as reading psychoanalysis through structural linguistics and developing ideas such as the psychoanalytic signifier, the object cause of desire (objet petit a), and the sinthome that allowed for useful advances in clinical work.

During his lifetime and for two decades after his death, Lacan was relegated in North America to academia, where he was read in critical theory courses. But, following translations by Bruce Fink, the English seminars of GIFRIC, and accessible introductions to Lacanian theory by Fink and others, Lacan has gained a broader following of clinicians in North America.

At this event, clinician and analyst-in-training Nathan Lupo will present two brief case-vignettes, using them as springboards for a discussion of Lacanian theory and its clinical applications.

Nathan Lupo, LMFT is a clinician and candidate-analyst at the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis. He works with patients online via Zoom and in person at his office near McKinley Park in Sacramento.

The Sacramento Psychoanalytic Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization led and supported entirely by volunteers who are dedicated to the promotion of psychoanalysis within the greater Sacramento region. 

We pursue our mission through organizing educational programs, reading groups, monthly presentations, case conferences, networking events, and hosting speakers of interest for the community of Sacramento – all are welcome to get involved!