First Sclinic Course

The Painting and Topology of Repression
What is the difference between Neurosis and Psychosis?

In the first semester we showed how Freud first makes the difference between primary repression (Uverdrängung)
and foreclosure (Verwufung), while Lacan called this a hole in the real and a hole in the
symbolic. What is not often distinguished is that it is only the former that is called ‘Traumatic’.

The Fall 2012 Course explained this difference by showing how the first establishes the basis for a clinic of neurosis and the second the basis of psychosis. We introduced this difference by first reading Freud’s Gradiva and his commentary on F.Ropp’s Temptation of St. Anthony as being a ‘painting of repression’.

In the second Winter 2013 semester we pass to Lacan’s topology of repression in showing how he constructs the difference between the neurotic structure of Joyce and psychotic structure of Schreber in formulating a theory of nonknots and knots.