Monday, May 4: Transference (Luca Flabbi)
Transference is a product, a specific product of that specific partnership between the analyst and the analysand. It is good news when it happens, since without transference there is no cure. But what differentiate the relationship of Freud’s psychoanalytic technique from those of other healing technique? What differentiate the transference of the relationship between analyst and analysand from the transferences of other relationships? It is a transference following a form that Freud has been the first to institute (psychoanalysis), and following a law that Freud has been the first to discover (the pleasure principle).

Tuesday, May 5: Abstinence (Glauco M. Genga)
Does abstinence (Abstinenz) mean giving up a faculty or opening up to an opportunity? Abstinence as exercising one’s own negative talent, a fundamental concept of Contri’s doctrine, creates the conditions for generating profit for the subject. Negative talent is not renouncing to receive satisfaction through the other, but renouncing the prejudicial objection to receive satisfaction through the other. As with transference, abstinence in the analytical relationship denotes it as a privileged relationship. It is the opposite of the abstinence of the stoic philosophers that promotes self-control and even detachment. In the psychoanalytic experience, it is not a matter of abstinence but of abstention: abstention from everything that would hinder the privilege given to the act of speaking.

Wednesday, May 6: Partnership (M. Gabriella Pediconi)
When we establish a partnership, we exercise our own principle of sovereignty. Could we describe the relationship between analyst and analysand as a relationship between two sovereign subjects? Neurosis is the fall (repression) of the subject’s own principle of sovereignty, but not its denial (psychosis), nor its disavowing (perversion). What is the aim of the psychoanalytic partnership? What does it want to obtain? What does it produce when it is successful? It produces the surprise of noticing — complete with material, even quantifiable, documentation — that:

The unconscious is alive and well, producing laws, even under the attacks of repression.
The unconscious allied with the analyst works to recognize and overcome the counter-juridical superego.

Giacomo B. Contri, “The Good of the Analyst,” in: Il Pensiero di Natura, Milano: Sic Edizioni, 2006.
Sigmund Freud, “The Dynamics of Transference.” (1912) in: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12.
Jacques Lacan, “Chapter 7” in: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006.

Course Objectives
6 CEUs will be provided
The seminar will allow the participants:
1. To familiarize themselves with the concept of transference as a product of the partnership between the analyst and the analysand. This is the first pillar of the good of the analyst with which Giacomo Contri renews the Freudian technique.
2. To explain the relevance of Freudian concept of abstinence (Abstinenz) not as renouncing to receive satisfaction through the other, but as renouncing the prejudicial objection to receive satisfaction through the other. This is the second pillar of the good of the analyst.
3. To define the third pillar of the good of the analyst as the partnership of two sovereign subjects — analyst and analysand — in defeating the super-ego’s resistances.