In the history of psychoanalysis, the concept of Unconscious has become a matter of belief. Instead, Contri claims that the unconscious is founded by the subject. The subject constitutes the unconscious as normativity to build the universe of all her relationships with the others. The psychopathology results from damaging the law that constitutes the unconscious. In a psychoanalysis, the subject gains – again – the unconscious. Giacomo Contri defined himself “Freudian after Lacan.” Every step in his elaboration leans on Freudian texts and supports their soundness as contributions to the science of thought.

We will use four concepts developed by Contri to read four core Freudian texts:

Mon, May 5: The drive as law of motion to read “Drives and Their Fates” (1915)

Tues, May 6: The pleasure principle perfected in reality principle as psychic occurrence to read “Formulations on the Two Principles of Psychic Functioning” (1911)

Wed, May 7: The coming of language in the sentence and the two steps of the foundation of law to read “The Unconscious” (1915)

Course Objectives
• 6 CEUs will be provided
• The seminar will allow the participants:
• To familiarize themselves with the concept of drive as a law of motion in reading Freud’s Drives and Their Fates.
• To explain the relevance of the reality principle as realization of the pleasure principle based on Freud’s Two Principles of Psychic Functioning.
• To familiarize themselves with Contri’s description of the advent of language in the foundation of the law of thinking, reformulating Freud’s 1915 definition of the unconscious.

Giacomo B. Contri, MD (1941-2022) was a training and supervising psychoanalyst based in Milan, Italy. He was founder and President of the Società Amici del Pensiero – Sigmund Freud (SAP). Before that, he was founder and President of Studium Cartello and the Psychoanalytic Society Il Lavoro Psicoanalitico. He has been member of the École Freudienne de Paris, of the École de la Cause Freudienne and of the Association internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse.

A Lacan’s analysant, the first Italian member of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, he translated and curated the Italian edition of Lacan’s Écrits. He has described and discussed the presence of Lacan in Italy in the French-Italian volume Lacan in Italia / En Italie Lacan, 1953 1978 (Sic-La Salamandra, 1978). He carefully described how he accepts Lacan’s legacy and how he wants to move it forward (poursuivre): “A common mistake is trying to find the new contribution of Lacan outside the coordinates that he himself respects with maximum vigilance: 1° there is only one psychoanalysis, 2° psychoanalysis is Freudian, 3° there is only one psychoanalytic movement (this latest assertion is the one creating the largest number of embarrassments)”. After Lacan’s death in 1981, Contri published Lexikon Psicoanalitico e Enciclopedia (Sic edizioni: Milano, 1987). He devotes a portion of the book to the Séminaire RSI (1975) where Lacan had presented the Borromean knot. He will come back to the same concept in 1989 stating: “anyone who know even a little Lacan’s work knows that it overflows of legal lexicon, and not only lexicon […] In short, the law is his guiding theme, as it had already been Freud’s guiding theme: in this, I think, Lacan has been Freudian, as he always said, differently from the dominant tendencies in the ‘world’ of psychoanalysis.”

Contri also worked on a PhD dissertation at the École Pratique des Hautes Études titled Loi symbolyque/Loi positive under the supervision of Roger Bastide, Roland Barthes, and Robert Lefort, later published in Italian as Leggi (Jaca Book: Milano, 1989). Among his main publications ll pensiero di natura: dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero giuridico (Sic edizioni: Milano, 1994, 1998, 2007) and L’ordine giuridico del linguaggio (Sic edizioni: Milano, 2003). For over twenty years he maintained a blog, posting daily, titled THINK!