Wittgenstein MS at Trinity College Cambridge
ARTICLES
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 5-8
Drawing on a close reading of Sohrab Sepehri’s poem ‘The Address’ and on key Freudian and Lacanian formulations, this paper explores desire through the lens of femininity as a structural position of lack rather than a gendered attribute. The recurring question— ‘Where is the friend’s home?’—is approached as a psychoanalytic metaphor for desire’s constitutive impossibility: a quest without destination that sustains the subject precisely through non-arrival. Situating Freud’s acknowledged impasse regarding femininity and Lacan’s conceptualisation of desire and objet petit a, the paper argues that femininity designates a threshold between the Symbolic and the Real, where desire comes into being as an effect of absence rather than satisfaction. By articulating femininity as a space that resists total symbolisation, the paper suggests that Freud’s confessed impotence before the feminine is not a theoretical failure but the very condition for a psychoanalytic ethics grounded in desire, incompleteness, and the enduring openness of the analytic question. .
Notes on notes or psyche in space
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 9-20
The rhythm of the cure – transference, repetition, and the psychoanalytic act
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 21-32
This article reconsiders Freud’s concept of construction in analysis by situating it within a broader theory of rhythm, repetition, and the psychoanalytic act. Against the hermeneutic model that conceives analytic work as the interpretation of latent meanings, the article argue that construction operates in a transformational way, aiming not at truth as correspondence but at the production of effects. Drawing on Freud’s late writings (Constructions in Analysis; Analysis Terminable and Interminable), Lacanian theory, and contributions from Lévi-Strauss, Deleuze and Guattari, and Fachinelli, the paper develops a metaphorical framework based on games, montage, and music to conceptualise analytic practice as a rhythmic operation. Construction is described as a pragmatic arrangement of signifiers whose validity is confirmed indirectly through the return of the repressed, rather than through the patient’s explicit assent or denial. The article further interprets psychoanalysis as a ‘nomad science,’ grounded in singularity and improvisation rather than universal method. Central to this perspective is the psychoanalytic act, understood as an event that introduces a rhythmic variation capable of displacing the compulsion to repeat and enabling a shift from passive to active repetition through transference. The clinic thus appears as a practice of rhythmic modulation, oriented toward transforming the subject’s relation to repetition and symptom rather than eliminating them.
Outtakes – Selections from Journal 1976-2025
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 33-41
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 42-7
La tesi dell’autore è che lo psicoanalista è colui che risponde alla chiamata dell’inconscio. Attraverso la discussione critica di un caso di interpretazione di un sogno, l’autore interroga alcune trasformazioni contemporanee della pratica clinica nel rapporto dello psicoanalista con la chiamata dell’inconscio. Evidenzia il rischio di una deriva ermeneutica che privilegia l’evidenza del testo manifesto e il rispecchiamento teorico dello psicoanalista. Mostra come il ricorso a modalità interpretative pre-analitiche sposti il sapere troppo dalla parte dell’analista, riducendo il ruolo della funzione associativa del paziente. Il testo rivendica la centralità della lingua privata del paziente come condizione per un’autentica esperienza analitica e per un ascolto rispettoso della verità inconscia.
The author’s thesis is that the psychoanalyst is the one who responds to the call of the unconscious. Through a critical discussion of a case of dream interpretation, the author interrogates some contemporary transformations of clinical practice in the psychoanalyst’s relationship with the call of the unconscious. He highlights the risk of a hermeneutical drift that privileges the evidence of the manifest content and the theoretical mirroring of the psychoanalyst. He shows how the use of pre-analytic interpretative methods shifts knowledge too much to the analyst’s side, reducing the role of the patient’s associative function. The text claims the centrality of the patient’s private language as a condition for an authentic analytic experience and for respectful listening to the unconscious truth..
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 48-55
Simulation theory has become a contemporary creation myth: a way to imagine ourselves as figments in the mind of a digital Other. In this paper I read it less as a hypothesis than as a fantasy-structure that secures identity. Using Lacan’s unary trait, Zhuangzi’s butterfly, and the liar paradox, I argue that analysis can shift the subject from object-of-the-Other to subject of enunciation..
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 56-9
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 60-7
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 68-76
‘Say whatever comes to mind.’ This is the only rule Freud asked his patients to follow during sessions. Patients who attempt to remain faithful to the emergence of so-called free associations end up with a tortuous discourse, full of digressions, repetitions, gaps, obscurities, sudden illuminations and equally sudden confusions. Is it possible to elevate this tortuosity to a method, and not only in the field of psychoanalysis? Is it possible to extract, from the structure of this rambling discourse, destined to grow on itself, parasitised from within by a germ that pushes it towards uncontrolled proliferation, something like an ontology? The best-case scenario would be an antidote to those discourses and practices that are so efficient, so accustomed to getting straight to the point, that we are now familiar with in so many areas, because in so many areas we have replaced the threatening logic of proliferation with the apparent rationality of an optimised, straight but most fragile line. We will try to demonstrate this with a series of forays (we could not fail to bear witness to that zigzag whose cause we would like to plead) into directions as diverse as communication theory, Darwinian evolutionism and skills-based pedagogy. The stakes involved in such an endeavour, moreover, are not really logical or ontological, but political..
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 77-82
In this article, it is shown that in all likelihood Lacan’s repetitive insistence in S8 (30th November 1960) that for Phaedrus love is a matter of theology, alludes to a recent controversy involving Werner Jaeger, Jean-André Festugière O.P. and Victor Goldschmidt (the latter two both being members of the Association des Études Grecques at Paris); and his own stance in regard to it. Jaeger first set forth his position in his 1936 Gifford Lectures (OUP 1947), arguing the case from Augustine’s reliance on Varro in his de civ. Dei. The debate hung on the meaning of the Greek words θεολογία and θεολογική and their use by Aristotle. While Goldschmidt stood firmly against Jaeger, Père Festugière turned to Jaeger’s side. And Lacan, it is suggested, who much admired the Dominican, followed suit. .
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 83-99
Nel testo si discute, fra Scienza, Filosofia e Psicologia, il complesso rapporto fra Coscienza e Inconscio. Mondo esterno e interno, costituzione e ambiente continuano a produrre controversie in psicoanalisi. L’intersoggettivo sembra novità, ma è sempre stato presente. La ‘psicoanalisi ontologica’ dovrebbe ricordare la temporalità di ciò che ‘non si è ancora’ per un valido lavoro terapeutico e per equilibrare silenzi e interpretazioni nelle psicoterapie.
The text discusses, within the realms of science, philosophy, and psychology, the complex relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. The external and internal worlds, constitution and environment, continue to generate controversy in Psychoanalysis. The intersubjective may seem new, but it has always been present. ‘Ontological psychoanalysis’ should remember the temporality of what ‘one is not yet’ for effective therapeutic work and to balance silences and interpretations in psychotherapy..
TEXTS & STUDIES
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 100-13
With the efforts of Freud and his successors, psychoanalytic practitioners have delved deeper into clinical psychoanalysis, generating numerous groundbreaking ideas that brought revolutionary changes and profound impacts to the field. In contemporary Chinese psychoanalysis, there is growing enthusiasm for object relations theory, intersubjectivity, and field theory. Clinical psychoanalysis increasingly demands that analysts transition from being objective, detached, and neutral observers and interpreters to becoming deeply emotionally involved participants. The mode of practice is shifting from epistemological psychoanalysis to ontological psychoanalysis. The latest theoretical advancement—Analytic Oneness—places the analyst’s being and ‘presencing’ at the core of the clinical situations. This paper explores the unknown—the realm of what cannot be known, is inaccessible and has never had a real existence—primarily based on Freud’s construction of the third unconscious, while also incorporating the perspectives of Winnicott and Bion. Additionally, it references Rudi Vermote and Ofra Eshel’s elaborations on the unrepressed unconscious. Finally, through an analytical vignette from my own supervisee’s case, I will briefly illustrate what psychoanalysis of the unknown entails.
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Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 114-26
Un enfant ayant subi la maltraitance, et qui fut témoin de violences conjugales, et qui appartenait à une famille marquée par la guerre et la précarité, était traumatisé par ces conditions familiales. Il risquait alors de rester prisonnier d’une identité aliénante qui aurait pu le condamner à l’échec scolaire voire à la maladie mentale, donc à la marginalisation, s’il ne trouvait pas un tuteur de résilience. En effet, souvent la conséquence d’un traumatisme majeur subi en bas âge consiste dans le développement d’une identité pathologique, figée, qui ne permet pas la créativité et l’adaptation. Le sujet risque de demeurer alors prisonnier de la compulsion de répétition du trauma par laquelle il ne cesserait de revivre son trauma initial à travers toutes ses relations. Dans ce cas l’approche phénoménologique descriptive permet de connaître le vécu traumatique qui fige le sujet dans une impasse en mettant en échec la fonction adaptative, synthétique et intégrative de la conscience, donc de la mémoire, du fait du clivage au Moi et du déni et de l’amnésie dissociative mis en œuvre comme mécanismes de défense inconscients contre le traumatisme. Nous évaluerons ensuite l’impact du traumatisme sur le sujet d’un point de vue métapsychologique, économique et quantitatif. Nous verrons alors comment il met aussi en échec la fonction pare-excitante du narcissisme du sujet, de même qu’il ébranle les assises narcissiques de celui-ci sans lesquelles il ne peut développer une bonne estime de soi et une bonne confiance en soi..
From Hegel to psychoanalysis: Richard Wollheim on Bradley
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 127-35
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 136-49
This paper looks at Freud’s Jewish identity in the context of the Jewish experience in Eastern and Central Europe after 1800, using his family history and significant figures in his life as illustration. Sigmund Freud’s life as a Jew is deeply paradoxical, if not enigmatic. He mixed almost exclusively with Jews while living all his life in an anti-Semitic environment. Yet he eschewed Jewish ritual, referred to himself as a Godless Jew and sought to make his movement acceptable to Gentiles. At the end of his life, dismayed by the rising forces of nationalism, he accepted that he was in his heart a Jew ‘in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial.’ The Eighteenth Century Haskalla (Jewish Enlightenment) was a form of rebellion against conformity and a means of escape from shtetl life, in this intense, entirely inward means of intellectual escape and revolt against authority, strongly tinged with sexual morality, we see the same tensions that were to manifest in the publication by a middle-aged Viennese neurologist of a truly revolutionary book to herald the new twentieth century: The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s life and work need to be understood in the context of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Mitteleuropa, the cultural renaissance of Central Europe, resulted from the emancipation and urbanisation of the burgeoning Jewish middle class, who adopted to the cosmopolitan environment more successfully than any other group. In this there is an extreme paradox: the Jewish success in Vienna was a tragedy of success. .
Vestigia, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2026, Pages 150-64
This article revisits Freud’s Wolf Man case by questioning the interpretative limits of the primal scene theory and the exclusive identification of the wolf figure with the paternal function. Rather than approaching the dream solely as the return of repressed desire or as evidence of castration anxiety, the study proposes a broader framework that integrates symbolic failure, maternal absence, cultural codes, and archetypal structures. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, mythology, and anthropological insights, the paper argues that the central disturbance in the Wolf Man case lies not in repression itself, but in the failure to establish symbolic boundaries through early relational experience. The analysis reconsiders the wolf motif as an archetypal figure associated not only with threat but also with guidance, nourishment, and an archaic form of law rooted in nature. The paper examines the roles of language, representation, guilt, and idealisation in the progressive disintegration of the subject’s psychic structure. It argues that when symbolic mediation fails—particularly through maternal withdrawal and the absence of effective boundary-setting—the subject seeks regulation through external ideals and performative identities rather than through internalised law.
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POEMS
OBITUARY