SCIENTIFIC MEETING – Adieu Lacan

Presenters: Richard C. Ledes, PhD and Mavis Himes, PhD, CPsych

Saturday, January 29, 2022: 9:30 am – 11:30 am

TPS Scientific Meeting: Open to Members, Affiliates/Guests, TIP Candidates, ATPPP Trainees and FPP Students Only

** Preregistration is required ** DISTANCE PARTICIPATION ONLY ** – This course will be conducted online. Email psychoanalyst@bellnet.ca to rsvp. Registration deadline is one week prior to the meeting.

This proposed presentation is a cinematic screening of a clinical case. With realistic acumen, as well as artistic expertise, Adieu Lacan portrays the struggles of a young woman, Seriema, who is trying to understand why her path to motherhood has reached an unbearable impasse. Following two miscarriages and the possible loss of her marriage, Seriema travels to Paris in 1972 to undergo psychoanalytic treatment with the maverick French analyst, Jacques Lacan. Her analysis is an attempt to help her to disentangle the enigma of her question: why has motherhood become a seeming impossibility? Inspired by the story of Betty Milan, a Brazilian psychoanalyst and writer, it follows closely her own actual psychoanalysis with Lacan. Based on a book and a play, (Good bye, Doctor and Lacan’s Parrot), in which Milan recounts her analytic work, Adieu Lacan offers an insightful and accurate account of an actual psychoanalytic cure. The film presentation will be followed by discussions with the two presenters.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of the session participants will be able to:

1. To become familiarized with the work of Jacques Lacan, the preeminent French psychoanalyst whose revolutionary return to Freud created a new way of thinking about psychoanalytic theory and technique.
2. To appreciate the trajectory of an analytic cure from beginning through the middle and end of treatment.
3. To recognize the impact and management of transference issues though the presentation of a clinical case.

Richard C. Ledes, PhD

Richard C. Ledes, Ph.D. is a film director, producer and writer based in New York City. Richard has directed and produced a number of films including Fred Won’t Move Out, The Caller, and A Hole in One. His latest film Ikonophile Z, a light romantic comedy about the extinction of all life on earth, is currently in post-production. He is currently working on Vienna 1913, a feature film slated for production in the fall of 2021 and based on a play of the same name by the late renowned French psychoanalyst and playwright Alain Didier-Weill.

Mavis Himes, PhD, CPsych

Mavis Himes, Ph.D., C. Psych. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Toronto. She is also clinical consultant at Wellspring, a cancer centre for patients and their families. Author of The Power of Names: Uncovering the Mystery of What We Are Called (Row-man & Littlefield, 2016) and The Sacred Body: A Therapist’s Journey (Stoddart, 2002), she has published numerous articles on Lacanian psychoanalysis. Dr. Himes was director of the former Speaking of Lacan Psychoanalytic Group, a Toronto-based forum dedicated to the study of Lacanian, psychoanalysis. She is a member of Apres-Coup Psychoanalytic Association (New York).