Wine, Cheese, & the Lacanian Clinic

​Join the SPS community as we gather for Wine, Cheese, and the Lacanian Clinic, where board member Nathan Lupo, LMFT, will present on the theoretical and practical insights of Lacan within the clinic. Food and wine will be provided!

​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.