LS Speaker Series 2025 with Chris Vanderwees

When: Feb 18, 2025 07:00 PM Vancouver (PST)

Where: Online. Please register for the event here. 

“Dwelling on the Direction of the Treatment for the Unhoused Subject”

In this presentation, we will follow a few questions in light of work with analysands who may be unhoused due to multiple and interconnected contingencies of poverty, trauma, and addiction that form each singular circumstance of destitution. How can psychoanalysis listen to the discourse of the unhoused subject? How might we hear the Thing that is unheimlich or unhomely in homelessness? And how might one begin to think about the direction of the treatment when working within a community of poverty where many of the analysands are living in circumstances of precarious housing? 

We will begin with a brief overview on psychoanalytic research on poverty, followed by several reflections on practice within the context of therapeutic community. We will explore the importance of therapeutic labor and open-ended psychoanalytic treatment in community settings while examining how an analyst can avoid withdrawing one’s desire to listen in the face of people who are unhoused and impoverished (which would only reveal the resistance of the analyst) but can instead deploy an ethics given some variations to the more “classical” psychoanalytical frame so that the unhoused person may have a space to speak about their suffering.

Biography: Chris Vanderwees, PhD, RP is a psychoanalyst, registered psychotherapist, and clinical supervisor at St. John the Compassionate Mission in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of On the History and Transmission of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, co-author with Daniel Adleman of Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric, co-editor with Alireza Taheri and Reza Naderi of Philosophy After Lacan, co-editor with Kristen Hennessy of Psychoanalysis, Politics, Oppression and Resistance, and translator of Betty Milan’s Analyzed by Lacan. He is also an affiliate of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and a member of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis.