This Master Class will be an in-person event at Seattle University, Stuart T. Rolfe Community Room, Admissions and Alumni Building, 824 12th Ave, corner of 12th and E. Marion Street.  There will be no video recording of this event. 

This program, when participated in its entirety, is available for 4 continuing education credits.  Division 39 is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists.  Division 39 maintains responsibility for this program and its content. This presentation also meets the requirements of WAC 246-809-620 (definition of recognized categories of continuing education for licensed mental health counselors, marriage and family therapists and social workers).

In this Alliance Master Class, Derek Hook, PhD will lead participants in a discussion of his 2018 essay “Melancholic Psychosis—A Lacanian Approach”.  Dr. Hook will elaborate upon his thinking since publication, facilitate discussion, and answer questions.  All participants will receive a copy of the essay (and two supplemental readings) upon registration.  In order to provide an intimate, stimulating discussion, the group will be limited to 25 participants who can directly engage with the author.

Hook, D.  (2018).  Melancholic psychosis—A Lacanian approach.  Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 28(4), 466-480.

Drawing on the conceptual resources provided by Lacanian accounts of melancholia and the death drive, and by means of reference to a clinical case summary and the film Into the Wild, this paper hopes to open up new ways of thinking about melancholic psychosis. The paper foregrounds a series of clinical themes that may be grouped under the rubric of “problems in symbolic fixit”: difficulties in receiving gifts, inability to mediate relations of intimacy, yearning for anonymity/disappearance, and the condition of the twilight world. These themes, while not obviously associated with Freud’s account of melancholia, represent areas of diagnostic priority for a Lacanian approach attuned to the role of symbolic processes and the traumatic “real” object.

Penn, S.  (Director).  (2007).  Into the Wild [Film].  Paramount.

Grigg, R.  (2015).  Melancholia and the unabandoned object.  In P. Gherovici & M. Steinkoler (Eds.), Lacan on madness: Madness, yes you can’t (pp. 139-158).  New York, NY: Routledge.

Derek Hook, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University and an Extraordinary Professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria.  A scholar and a practitioner of psychoanalysis with expertise in the areas of Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-colonial theory (the work of Frantz Fanon in particular), the psychology of racism and critical social psychology, Dr. Hook is the author of A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid (Routledge, 2012); (Post)apartheid Conditions: Psychoanalysis and Social Formation (Palgrave, 2012); Steve Biko: Voice of Liberation (HSRC Press, 2014); and Six Moments in Lacan: Communication and Identification in Psychology and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2018).

Dr. Hook is the editor of Lie on Your Wounds: The Collected Prison Correspondence of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe (Wits University, 2019) and co-editor with Calum Neill of the Palgrave Lacan Series; with Stijn Vanheule and Calum Neill of the three-volume Reading Lacan’s Ecrits series (Routledge, 2019, 2020, 2022); with Leswin Laubscher and Miraj Desai of Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology (Routledge, 2021); and with Sheldon George of the recent volume Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity and Psychoanalytic Theory (Routledge, 2022).

Dr. Hook’s applied (socio-political) research tends to focus on the various psychical modalities of racism, often in the contexts of American and South African culture. He is particularly interested in a psychoanalytic tracing of the various affective/psychical dimensions of race and racism, as exemplified in recent publications focusing on topics such as white anxiety; petrified life; the temporality of racism in Fanon; death-bound subjectivity and Fanon's zone of non-being; the death-drive in culture; and racist and racializing embodiment.

Learning Objectives:

• Participants will be able to distinguish and explain the crucial differences between Freudian and Lacanian approaches to melancholia.
• Participants will be able to identify and elaborate upon a series of Lacanian concepts (objet a, the role of symbolic mediation, psychotic structure, the death drive) that underlie clinical phenomena of melancholia.
• Participants will be able to utilize case material to consider the role of "twilight scenes" and suicidal ideation in melancholia in a way which is suggestive of prospective clinical strategies in treatment.

Video:

• Follow Dr. Hook on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/channels/UCzdZyq2SC93tMn3fLTknlMQ/videos
• Harvard African Studies Workshop, April 3, 2017, https://vimeo.com/213237295

Interviews:

• Derek Hook, "Six Moments in Lacan: Communication and Identification in Psychology and Psychoanalysis" (Routledge, 2018) | New Books Network
• "Six Moments in Lacan" Interview
• Stijn Vanheule, Derek Hook and Calum Neill, "Reading Lacan's Écrits" (Routledge, 2018) | New Books Network
• "Reading Lacan's Écrits" Interview
• Post-colonial Psychoanalysis, Philosophy—Rendering Unconscious

Participants: This event is designed for graduate level students in mental health and all mental health professionals from introductory to advanced levels.  The presentation is geared for clinicians who wish to advance their knowledge and expand their skill base in psychodynamic clinical work.

Refund Policy: Refunds less a $35 handling fee will be given up until three weeks before the presentation.