Listening To You - Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in London
  • Welcome
  • Listening
  • Psychoanalysis
  • The Therapist
  • Beginning therapy
  • Code Of Practice
  • Contact Details
  • Links
  • A Psychoanalyst's Blog

What is real in a historical event?

9/4/2014

 
This is a slightly edited transcription of a talk I delivered on April 5, 2014, at the “Workshop in preparation of the WAP Congress” of the London Society of the NLS. The theme of the congress is "A Real for the 21st Century". The Workshop, organised by Janet Haney, was structured around four entries from the upcoming English version of Scilicet. Each was presented by a member or friend of the London Society who participated in the process of translation and editing. My talk was in connection to “Shoah”, a paper by French psychoanalyst Philippe Benichou.

Dear friends and colleagues,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today here about some of the questions I found myself struggling with, while reading and translating “Shoah” by Philippe Benichou.

Benichou’s paper talks about the Shoah. You cannot wonder, Benichou writes, what a "real for the twenty-first century" could be, without mentioning that event beyond meaning, real, all too real, the Shoah.

I was captivated but also puzzled by the power of this depiction of the Shoah as an “event beyond meaning, real, all too real”.

I asked myself, what could this mean?

Attempting to formulate an answer, I found myself faced with further questions:

What is an event? What is history? What is a historical event?

And then: What is real in a historical event?

This is how I will begin.


Read More

    About

    This is the blog of
    Christos Tombras
    a psychoanalyst practising
    in London.

    For more information,
    please click here.

    For a list of all posts,
    please click here.

    Archives

    April 2025
    January 2020
    May 2019
    March 2016
    October 2014
    April 2014
    May 2013
    October 2012
    February 2012
    July 2011
    June 2011
    February 2011
    September 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009
    October 2009
    September 2009
    August 2009


    RSS Feed


    Categories

    All
    Body Mind Dichotomy
    Books
    Brain Initiative
    Cfar
    Descartes
    Discourse Ontology
    Dsm
    Event
    Evidence
    Falsification Criterion
    Films
    Free Will
    Hard Sciences
    Health Professions Council
    History
    Immanuel Kant
    Jacques Lacan
    Jouissance
    Lanzmann
    Lecture
    Martin Heidegger
    Measuring Effectiveness
    Medical Model
    Mental Illness
    Nazism
    Nimh
    Oedipus Complex
    Phantasy
    Psychoanalysis
    Psychosis
    Randomized Control Trials
    Reality
    Regulation Of Psychotherapy
    Resistance
    Reviews
    Scientific Research
    Sexuality
    Shoah
    Sigmund Freud
    Signifier
    Stigma
    Symptoms
    Teaching
    Therapy
    The Unconscious
    Truth
    Ukcp


Listening To You • An Invitation to Talk • Lacanian Psychoanalysis • London     © 2009 - 2025