The title of my speech is “On Freud’s contribution”. The preposition “on” underlines first of all that I will only speak about a certain dimension of Freud’s works. Then the “on” denotes that I will not cite his theory but that I will speak about his theory. Of what kind is the difference I am talking about? Such a theory, but also many sentences in our everyday life; our dispositions for one thing and another are not mere pronouncements. They rather have the character of an answer, a reply, which is all too often neglected. Recently for example, a client and colleague of mine were saying that he feels embarrassed to say that he is a therapist. This sentence is not a pronouncement. It’s being said in opposition to someone, who is questioning him, looking at him cautiously, ironically, mockingly. The fact that it is like that, and who that someone is, it can be revealed during the course of psychotherapy, but this is not of interest right now. Let’s retain that our language, even in the case of a monologue, even in our thoughts, even in our silences, it has from the outset and always this dialogical character.

So, I will discuss Freud’s theory about the unconscious not as a theory but in the light of a dialogue in which I see this theory as belonging. In what question, in which query does Freud answer through his theory about the unconscious? He gives the direction himself. In his paper titled “The unconscious” he writes:

[The case of the unconscious] is necessary because the givens of consciousness consist of gaps to a great degree· often in healthy people in as much as in sick there happen various psychic activities whose explanation presupposes other activities, which are not to be revealed through consciousness. Such activities are not only the parapraxes and the dreams in healthy people, and even everything that one would call psychic symptoms [...] in patients. – Our ever personal everyday experience, reports to us ideas, the origin of which we do not know, and inferences deriving from thoughts, the workings of which remain hidden from us. All those conscious activities would remain unlinked and incomprehensible if we were to insist on the claim that we are supposed to consciously be aware of all the psychic activities that take place within us. We place such psychic activities in a state of a demonstrational interrelation when we include the unconscious activities that were revealed. Nevertheless, the gain in meaning and interrelating is an utterly justified motive, which can lead us beyond any immediate experience.

We will now examine those words very carefully.

"[The case of the unconscious] is necessary because the givens of consciousness consist of gaps to a great degree." What are the gaps Freud talks about? He sees them in parapraxes, in dreams, in the psychic symptoms, but also in the ideas of everyday life, "the origin of which we do not know." In what way does a gap appear? A parapraxis is e.g. the forgetting: A woman, in leaving from the room of a known man to her, she leaves her bag behind, in that room. While in the street she suddenly regains her consciousness, it is like she is waking from a dream, she sees that on her hand, in the place where her bag should be hanging, she has nothing; on her hand - a gap. She gets upset, she suddenly finds herself on that gap, it is her who becomes the gap now. Something like dizziness overcomes her and Freud as well.

Few months ago my wife dreamed that we were in Sumatra – a place she has never been to, I have never been to, we hadn’t thought of and we had never mentioned either; her life in Greece, her life story, her horizons on one hand and Sumatra on the other and in between them - a gap.

A gap is evident every time that a ‘psychic symptom’ as it is called, an idea, an action, a decision comes, as we say, ‘out of thin air’. Of course we say ‘out of thin air’, but we do not believe that. We tend to treat such event more or less like Freud, that is by believing that this ‘nowhere’ is not really a ‘nowhere’ but that it is us who do not yet know the connection, the explanation that bridges the chasm between the woman with the bag and the woman without the bag, between Greece of awaken state and Sumatra of the dream state.

We do not treat the gap as a gap. Already the fact that a forgetting, a dream etc. startle us shows that we are prejudiced. Because it is only in a world governed by explanations, connections, the search for meaning and interrelations that someone will be startled by a forgetting and by a dream, will talk about gaps and will worry.

In the viewpoint that I am presenting you with here, the grounding in such prejudice started with the portrayal of the world as a machine. “Machina mundi”, cosmic machine. The expression is being met already in Latin Christian texts from the Hellenistic years and initially it included god as the chief engineer of this cosmic machine. Later on, in the period between 15^th and 18^th century, the machine fires her engineer. The initial stages in the building of the new image of the world answer in the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton. The scientific portrayal of the world becomes predominate. This is, very briefly, the prejudice I mentioned earlier. We have taken on such prejudice not only through the breast milk, as a teacher of mine used to say, but even through the breast milk of our grand- and great grand-mothers.

The so called ‘psychic’ is also a portrayal coming from earlier years - a subject on which I cannot expand any further here. Freud’s contribution consists in the fact that quite decisively he placed the sphere of the ‘psychic’ into the machina mundi. The title under which the psychic becomes part of the cosmic machine is: “psychic apparatus”, where the word “apparatus” is a translation from the German “Apparat”, which means “device”; thus a more mechanistic, tool-like nature is more apparent through such a term.

A characteristic of such a machine is that its gears do not allow for any gap between them. Its operation, as far as our subject goes, depends on the explanation - the interpretation. The energy necessary for its movement is derived through impulses and desires. In the ‘psychic apparatus’ with its ‘mechanisms’ a perpetual and multifaceted interaction of its parts takes place. Its structure is registered with the model of Freudian meta-psychology.

Freud concludes the passage I presented earlier, with the sentence: “Nevertheless, the gain in meaning and interrelating is an utterly justified motive, which can lead us beyond any immediate experience.” The sentence is calamitous. More or less he renders as real that which for me has meaning and interrelation. In other words real is what I feel as real. The gates of arbitrariness are now wide open. The ‘immediate experience’, the reference to the things themselves, which is the only possible measure for a society worthy of its name, becomes crudely obsolete.

Let’s see this in the simple example of the woman who in leaving from her acquaintance’s room she forgets her bag there. What is here the ‘immediate experience’? First of all it is the nothing in the hand of this woman that is now out in the street. Freud does not pay attention to this, and he can’t do so because according to his prejudice he renders it as fake and he already has turn his attention towards the exploration of an explanation. It becomes obvious even by his initial phrase where he talks about "... psychic activities whose explanation presupposes other activities...". And not even the whole phrase is needed but already only the ‘psychic activities’ is enough. Because when I describe the forgetting as a ‘parapraxes’, that is ‘activity’ and ‘energy’, then I have already seen it as something that I "do". I remind you of ordinary expressions coming from psychiatrists and psychologists where we are talking about someone who is ‘doing’ depression, ‘doing’ panic attack etc. To Freud himself the dream is synonymous to ‘dreamwork’; the mourning is synonymous to ‘the work of mourning’.

And why am I talking here about prejudice? It is because, the phenomenon of forgetting itself does not allude to anything that has to do with action and activity. The woman is merely realising at some point that on her hand there is nothing hanging. The woman will say ‘I forgot’. And already the word ‘forget’ is misleading us. Because the word speaks in what grammar calls the ‘active voice’, as if it has to do, by definition, with the activity of a subject.

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has brought to our attention that, words can also trap us, and they do so all too often. Already we are reading in Nietzsche:

"That there is a forgetting has not been proven as yet." We only now that remembering is not in our control. In this gap of power we temporarily placed that word ‘forget’: as if there is an additional ability in the index. Alas, what rests in our hands after all!"

“That there is a forgetting has not been proven as yet.” This phrase seems ridiculous. If we do not become misguided by our first reaction and we do not give into it, we could find ourselves in a case of a contingency. Like for example that the word ‘forget’, in disregard for grammatical rules, has no present tense; because in forgetfulness belongs the fact that I am forgetting my forgetting. ‘I forgot’ also means ‘I lost myself in something’. I cannot say I ‘forget’ in the same way I can say ‘I am talking to you’. Nevertheless, the woman will say ‘I forgot’ like in the afternoon I will be able to say ‘I talked to you’. Why is the woman making a mistake in her way of talking? It is because in the afternoon I will be able to recall my speech to you. But a replay of forgetting is impossible. The woman of the street cannot recall the woman of the room at the time when the latter forgets her bag. Forgetting is not reported anywhere as an experience. Forgetting as forgetting is not a phenomenon and is not an experience! And what has taken place in the friend’s room?

The woman who will say “I forgot”, will follow the “I forgot”, explicitly, or implicitly, with an “I don’t believe this!” and “how did I do this?” and “I did that?” It remains un-answered for her. And she is right, more than she realises. Because the woman of the room who leaves without the bag is indeed a different person from the woman of the street, for whom the bag with the keys, the wallet, the mobile etc. is considered an integral part of her life, it is an extension of her hands. The latter woman gets scared when she faces the former one who is moving along with an unimaginable carelessness, with naked hands, without any concern about keys and house and car, wallet and needs and give-and-take, mobile and networking with friends and relatives. “Did I do this?” “Yes”, I would perhaps say to her, “you did that as well, and you became that other woman as well!”

Now the ‘I forgot’ and its gap is talking to us in a different light. The gap is presented as the distance that the woman of the street takes from the woman of the room, whom she doesn’t recognize, doesn’t accept, but she betrays and denies. The woman of the street sees herself as one dimensional; she represents only that one form of her. For the woman of the room she says: “This woman is not me”. She has lost the woman of the room, she has forgotten her.

The face that this woman only accepts as her own is the one that wants the person to have everything in her hands - to be the engineer of the cosmic engine. All too often our interpretations have the meaning: this can be explained, these are the reasons, so it is in your hands to change it. Nevertheless, the thoughtful therapist will say, together with Nietzsche: “Alas, what rests in our hands after all!” - not because the therapist’s hands cannot seize and rather stand inactive and helpless but because he knows more hands than that- hands that show, hands that touch in an airy manner, hands that deny, hands that wave.

For him who does not know it, the helpless hands are, we return to Nietzsche, “the gap of our power”, and this we name e.g. “I forget”, as if it were also about an activity, an action, “as if there is an additional ability in the index”, the workings of which, to reminds us of Freud’s words, has remained hidden from us. So, Freud would say for example that the woman forgets her bag in the room because she has the “hidden”, that is the unconscious desire to return to that room. The forgetting has become an activity and action and ability, the gap of our power has been rendered false, the hidden workings come to light, there is at last one demonstrated correlation, Freud, and everything is once again back in our control.

This explanation is “beyond the immediate experience”. (Thus, here we speak neither of the case of a planned action on the side of the woman that would be conscious, nor of a, as it is termed, pre-conscious intention.) What does it offer then, i.e. this explanation? It asserts our prejudice. It calms us down. Wittgenstein:

The disastrous in the scientific way of thinking that has prevailed around the world, is that it wants to answer every single worry with an explanation.

I would add to that: Already the fact there is a worry speaks of the need for an explanation, an answer to the “how?” and to the “why?” What fosters this worry? The obligation to become, the way Descartes had put it, “maîtres et possesseurs de la nature”, “chiefs and owners of nature”, in other words to represent the world as a machine and ourselves as the engineers of that machine. And what is here the worry Wittgenstein talks about? The fact that the world is not presented here as a machine in itself. The worry comes carrying the eternal realisation that the shore is crooked and that we need to straighten it out. In the “immediate experience” the forgetting of the bag is not presented as an action. To forget means to for-get, "for" meaning primarily "far, away". The forgotten thing gets away and alongside it I myself get away – I as the engineer of the cosmic engine, e.g. as the woman with the keys, the wallet and her cell-phone. The getting away needs to be re-interpreted into ability and mechanism.

The magic word that re-interprets the forgetting into a mechanism, and straightens out the shore; the word that is supposed to render us chiefs and owners of our course and calms us down, is the: process. In the passage that was presented earlier Freud speaks about a "hidden process". And so it is important, when we talk of processes, to remember that we are not talking about natural stuff but about how things have to be presented so that they can fit into the image of the cosmic machine that has pre-empted us. We do not realise that we are moving along a vicious circle, in other words that we end up in what we have already set as a pre-requisite: the existence of a “hidden process” that is revealed through an explanation.

A note from Wittgenstein says the following:

How do we end up in the philosophical problem of the psychic processes and situations [...]? – The first step is the one that doesn’t catch any attention at all. We are talking about processes and situations and we leave their nature open! [Freud: 'The ultimate personal everyday experience, discloses to us ideas, the origin of which we do not know of, and conclusions of thoughts, the process of which has remained hidden from us.'] Perhaps one day we might learn more about this – hypothetically. [Freud, in the same passage: 'There is nothing one wouldn’t give in order to know these things better!'] But it is exactly this that has detained us in this particular predisposition. Because we have a certain idea about what it means: to know a process more in depth. (The decisive step in this conjuring trick has taken place, and this is exactly what we perceived as innocent.) [...]

First of all, the forgetting of the bag is not a process. However, its representation as a process and its subsequent interpretation, i.e. as the woman’s unconscious desire to return, calms us down. In addition, it also calms us down the idea that we “negotiate” and “manage” and “work-through” our problems. All those expressions would be unconceivable if our problems were not presented as “process”.

The point thus is the criterion: the deceitful security and complacency, or the truth. The decision lies with the ethos and heart of each therapist beyond schools and methods etc., and with each one who will seek a solution to his suffering through psychotherapy.

Let’s re-approach the subject of what is called “process” from a different point of view this time. The word is a translation from the Latin processus, procedere. It literally means moving forward, progress. From the time of ancient Romans up to the present time such a progress is primarily represented as a movement in space, from a place to another, but consequently also as a succession of things and processes in time. This does not hold true only for physicochemical processes in the field of physical sciences. Our representation of associations let’s say, is an axiom that serves as the ground not only for Freudian but also and more generally for the psychological and even the biological version of what we name “thought”. It appears in the Anglo-Saxon philosophy of 18^th century. As far as the issue of process is concerned the importance lies with the succession of thoughts in the sense of associations, their progress, takes place as a temporal elaboration, where time is equally presented as progress in the axis of a coordinate, as time-span and passage. A process can only take place in a specific space and time that are presented as dimension and time-span, as linear sizes, to remain within classic physics, and that’s why these are measurable along the axes of coordinates: Newton, machina mundi.

Are this space and this time an “immediate experience”? I will only make one remark. Today I left my house to come to Stavroupoli. I calculated that I need forty-five minutes. Here I moved, as any other logical person, based on this presentation of time as a time-span that is that the trip would last around forty-five minutes. Who is the person who talks here in the first-person narrative? It’s me of course. However this ‘I‘ is a pronoun of a physical body that moves around based on the laws of physics, counting as it were the distance, the speed etc. and calculating his time. I repeat the question: Are this space and this time an “immediate experience”? No. Because this ‘I’ is the gear of the cosmic machine, and a gear doesn’t have experiences, either direct, or indirect. Otherwise, if we were talking about experiences, then this word would mean checking and recording of the process of his transportation from his house to Stavroupoli.

Now I trace back on the 23^rd of November. I find myself in my surgery in Athens and I am writing these lines. Is the “I” who writes the same as the “I” who drives the car? No. The “I” who was mentally talking to you on the 23^rd of November, and who today stands for what he wrote back then, is a different “I” from that of the driver. It is the personal pronoun of a life with its story, with the things that have marked such life, i.e. Freud’s work, with its long-standing dialogue with such work, with the dead-ends that this life met and the paths that opened up for it and with much more that eventually get lost within the upper and lower ground of all incomprehensible things, to re-phrase the words of the Greek novelist Alexander Papadiamantis.

The “I” who was writing all these and who today is talking to you wasn’t at the point of the axis of the time coordinate that shows “23^rd of November” and along the axis of the coordinates of space that says “Athens, Marasli str.” And he wasn’t there because in Athens of the 23^rd of November I was already with you on Stavroupoli of the 19^th of December. You were present then and I was talking to you. Athens and Stavroupoli, 23^rd of November and 19^th of December were coupled together.

And this morning once again, in setting out from home, I was already in Stavroupoli. Otherwise I would have never been able to take the direction to here and reach here.

I allude here to a different experience of time and space, since no coordinate could have one point that would correspond to two different dates and two different spaces. If we pay attention, we will realise that this is the way we live our lives, in those kinds of time and space. We speak for example of someone who looks distracted, we ask him “where are you?”, or we say “he is elsewhere”. At this morning hour of Tuesday, someone among you might already be in the tavern where he is supposed to meet tonight with his friends.

In this light, which is the light of our everyday world, we saw the woman who comes face to face with the gap in her hand. And in a similar way we could look at dreams and psychic symptoms and at everything that take place on our steps. It is not easy since the prejudice of the cosmic machine reserves traps and renders our effort for a catharsis from it a trial, but also an amazing adventure, which is worth living for.

I cannot expand any further. I started off from Freud’s work. I reached an end. Everything that I have told you is a sign of a path in which Freud's work stood as a road-sign and gave a direction. Without it a continuance of that path would have been impossible, e.g. in the way that it continued here, a juxtaposition with his word wouldn’t have been possible either, in the way that it took place here, the appeal of alternative words and traditions in the way that it happened here, the shaping of a therapist, the way it happened everything that happened, his today’s speech which is a conversation - because it is you who have written it5 . Thus, to the degree that this is not about a personal delirium, it is a cause that does not concern only him, but you as well and all of us – and Freud, who is also included in its editors.

It is in this way somehow that his contribution could act and be realised.