Report on the “Knottings” Seminar of theHellenic Society of the NLS

The Knottings Seminar of the Hellenic
Society of the NLS took place on Saturday, October 22^nd, in the
eastern auditorium of the “Georgios Gennimatas” Athens General Hospital. This first
event of the academic year was dedicated to the study of the theme of the next
NLS Congress and was accordingly entitled, “About the Unconscious: Position and
Interpretation of the Formations of the Unconscious”.

The seminar’s theoretical
introduction by the vice-president of the NLS Bernard Seynhaeve bore the Freudian
title, “The Royal Road to the Unconscious”. To put us on the pathway of the
next NLS Congress, Bernard Seynhaeve spoke about the transition from the
transferential to the real unconscious. He remarked that in Lacan’s original
teaching, interpretation offered the subject effects of an illusion of the
order of “it was written”; the unconscious-memory. Yet in the end of his teaching
Lacan detached himself from the unconscious-memory, and the aforementioned
illusion was subsequently replaced by a new writing, that of Lituraterre, the sinthome and the One that constitutes
the antechamber of the real. There is therefore a sliding from the symptom to
the sinthome, from the transferential
unconscious to the real unconscious. Bernard Seynhaeve demonstrated this transition
based on two formations of the unconscious, two dreams: 1) a dream that
accompanied the beginning of his own analysis and 2) a dream of the Pass – not
of his own, but rather Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection. Bernard Seynhaeve
characterized this as a dream of the Pass thanks to the fact that in the second
climax of the dream, following the horrendous vision of the inside of Irma’s
mouth, Freud teaches us of a writing beyond which we cannot go.

The first
clinical case of the day was presented by Alan Rowan, under the title “Not
Wanting to Know”. Alan Rowan spoke of a female subject who visited him overwhelmed
with anxiety stemming from an impasse in her marital life. Analysis offered that
subject the space to speak about her history of romantic relationships and
about her family history. It was concluded that the fragile symptom of the
subject’s choice of a partner had been formed on the basis of “not seeing and
not knowing”.

The next
clinical case came from Joanne Conway. She presented us with the case of
another female subject under the equivocal title “Keeping Mum”. This was the
case of a woman who had experienced a traumatic encounter with an evil Other.
An intervention by the analyst that showed the patient the possibility for another,
benevolent type of Other, was followed by rigorous work with dreams.

The last
clinical case of the day came from Argyris Tsakos. He presented the case of a
young woman who came to see him accompanied by two signifiers linked to her relationship
with her two parents. In the beginning, his pragmatic interventions bore
impressive results. Much later came a dream thanks to which the patient became capable
of following a new pathway that was not discouraged, although it meant leaving
analysis.

This seminar
was indeed a “knotting” of insightful theoretical and varied clinical work on
the unconscious. Its outcomes will certainly act as guidance for the Hellenic Society’s
work in the academic year that has just began.

Yannis Grammatopoulos

Hellenic Society of the
NLS