Charles Turk is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst practicing in Chicago. He is a board and faculty member of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. He is engaged in Project 606, a group that spontaneously arose in Chicago with the aim of developing a program for the treatment of extreme states alternative to hospitalization.
He also serves on the board of The Expanded Mental Health Services that founded the Kedzie Center, the first taxpayer-supported community mental health center in Illinois. There he volunteers engaging in clinical work, consulting, and conducting a continous-case seminar, introducing the metapsychological elaborations developed to treat extreme states.
While a student at Miami University in Ohio, a course in embryology moved him from chemistry to biology. Subsequently, following an urge to cure ill people, he matriculated from the Western Reserve University School of Medicine, in Cleveland.
He completed his residency at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of Illinois in Chicago – at a time before psychiatry discovered the brain. Then psychiatry was psychoanalysis. The chairman and all the faculty were analysts. There he developed an interest in the treatment of psychotic and other severely ill people.
He obtained psychoanalytic training at the Center for Psychoanalytic Study in Chicago. For twelve years he was medical director of a partial hospitalization program in a community mental health center, in suburban Chicago, for which the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill gave gun an Exemplary Psychiatrist Award.
He later received a Local Educator award from the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education – in light of his several presentations on various aspects of his work with psychotic patients.
For the past 26 years, he has continued psychoanalytic studies at the Ecole Freudienne du Quebec. He subsequently became an analyst of the school, and serves as the Responsible for the Chicago Circle of the EfQ.