1st Hellenic-Italian Psychoanalytic Meeting

First psychoanalytic meeting between the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and the Greek Psychoanalytic Society

On the Sources of Psychoanalysis: The Ancient Greek Tragedy

Tragedy in the course of its evolution from the Dionysian to Euripides, with Aeschylus and Sophocles as intermediate links, carries in its body the traces of the history of the symbolic passage of the human from the primitive undifferentiated to the symbolized and from the pre-Oedipal, early conflict to the Oedipal.

The passage from the undifferentiated to the differentiated takes place in tragedy as in psychoanalysis through the dream process. Through the dream work, the subject moves from the non differentiating practiced incest into the dream incest – a potential space for a mourning processing of the relationship with the other.

Tragedy, like psychoanalysis, offers the opportunity each time for a kind of renegotiation of uncertain repression and uncertain symbolization, with a temporary release of the early, the primitive, the undifferentiated, the violent, the murderous, the cannibalistic, which do not recognize the prohibition of incest and merging with the object.

Psychoanalysis can be defined as the inheritor of ancient tragedy in that it activates its "tragic" transformative action, catharsis, extending its utility to the most common and important dimension of human experience, the dream.

Sarantis Thanopulos, president of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society

Christos Dervis, president of the Hellenic Psychoanalytical Society

Speakers

Athanasios Alexandridis, Giacomo Calvi, Angelique Costis, Chryssoula Giannoulaki, Dimitris Malidelis, Massimo De Mari, Haris Morikis, Lorena Preta, Andrea Rapisarda, Lena Telioni, Sarantis Thanopulos, Dionysios Tsiogris. Christos Zervis, Konstantinos Zervos