The Ethics CEU
AKA - The Ethical Treatment of Symptoms Today
By: Neil Gorman (DSW, LCSW, AP)
The Requirement:
Licensed Social Workers (LSW) and Licensed Clinical Social Workers (LCSW) must obtain 30 Continuing Education Units (CEUs) every two years, and at least 3 hours must include content related to the ethical practice of social work.
The current licence renewal cycle will come to an end on 11/30/2025.
The Problem:
The ethics CEUs people create/attend can be done to "check a box," but they are not interesting or useful.
But it does not need to me like that!
I've been working for several months to create an ethics CEU that will be both interesting and useful to clinicians.
My Ethics CEU:
Since I've become a licensed CEU provider, I've been thinking about creating an ethics CEU that I would want to attend, one that would be engaging and fun to attend, and one that would offer me clinically useful information.
What I've made:
The CEU I've made will focus on treating symptoms, but from a psychoanalytic perspective.
What that means is that rather than conceiving symptoms merely as problematic behaviors that need to be eliminated from the patient's lived experience, I will...
- Describe and give examples of how a symptom always starts out as a solution to a problem in a patient's life before it becomes a problem in and of itself.
- Demonstrate a way of formalizing a symptom as a solution, and then constructing a useful and actionable construction of the patient's relationship to the symptom.
- Explore the satisfactions (jouissance) at stake in the symptom.
- Explore the possible objects the symptom drives at.
- Explore articulations of the unconscious assumptions (e.g., fundamental fantasy, Phantasy, Phantasm) that the symptom serves.
Another way of describing what this CEU aims to produce:
I think that symptoms are partners in people's lives. (I also think that symptoms influence the kinds of romantic and professional partnerships people choose.)
By the end of this training, participants will have explored the ways patients' subjective relationship to their symptom-as-partner can be shifted through a clinical experience.
I hope this sounds interesting to you!
Event Details:
📅 Date: Tuesday, October 28, 2025, 5:30 pm - 8:30 pm
📍 Location: Saint Andrews, Episcopal Church at 1125 Franklin Street, Downers Grove, IL 60515
The registration cost is $75.00; however, there are two ways to reduce this price.
- If you register for the Linking Seminar on Saturday, 11/15, you will get a promo code that you can use to bring the cost of this CEU down to $50.00
- If you don't want to attend the Linking Seminar, you can still receive an early registration discount, which brings the cost to $65.00, by using the promo code EARLYETHICS at checkout.