A Scientific Meeting Presented by Derek Hook

Event Price: This event is free. CE fee is $10 for members and $20 for non-members. 

Continuing Education (CEU/CME): 1.5 credits

(CE information will be sent to all attendees the week after the event.)

Attendance: This is a hybrid event: in-person and online attendance is available. Online attendees will have a webinar experience, which will not include the ability to ask questions of the speaker. No attendance limit.

NOTE: Pre-registration is encouraged. Walk-in registration is available. No CEs available for walk-ins.

Reception 6 - 6:30 p.m. at the Center before the presentation.

Program Description: One refrain we often hear in post-Freudian forms of psychoanalysis is that Freud's notion of the drive, while important, is perhaps less important than other and ostensibly more important factors, such as fundamental relations or attachments. This general sentiment is often accompanied by another trend in psychoanalysis, the increasing de-prioritization of the role of sexuality and sexual fantasy in clinical work. If we have then neglected the role of the drive in clinical work and case formulation, how might this situation be remedied? One helpful resource in this respect is Freud's 'Three Essays on Sexuality' which provides a series of apt formulations regards the appearance and role of partial drives - and sexuality more generally - in the life of a subject. This paper will highlight multiple facets of the drive - amongst which is, of course, a type of relationality arguably inherent in the concept - and do so accessibly, via Freud's work, so as to highlight opportunities for case formulation. The paper will conclude by suggesting that Freud provides us with the basis for a type of case formulation that traces vicissitudes of the drive - i.e. how it connects to transference, latency, identification, symptoms, and modes of jouissance (libidinal enjoyment) - across the life of an analysand.

Learning Objectives:

1) understand the psychoanalytic notion of the drive in a 're-freshed' and multi-dimensional way that connects it to transference, relationality, symptoms, jouissance, and fantasy.

2) be able to utilize facets of Freud's 'Three Essays on Sexuality' as a way of highlighting crucial elements of the drive as a basis for case formulation.

Derek Hook is a Professor in Psychology and a clinical supervisor at Duquesne University and an Extraordinary Professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria. 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 is the author of Fanon, Psychoanalysis and a Critical Psychology of the Decolonial (2025), Whiteness at the Abyss (2025) and the co-editor of Fanon, Phenomenology and Psychology (with Leswin Laubscher) and the co-editor of Lacan and Race (with Sheldon George). He maintains a YouTube channel with many lectures on Lacanian Psychoanalysis.