Yavuz Erten is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist. In 1987, he graduated from Boğaziçi University, Department of Psychology. In 1989, he completed his master’s degree in clinical psychology at the same university. Between 1998 and 2003, he completed the training of Contemporary Psychoanalysis at the National Institute of Psychotherapies (NIP) in New York. Between 2004-2009, he completed his psychoanalytic training at the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) and became a psychoanalyst. In 2015, he was authorized by IPA as a Training and Supervision analyst. He is a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) and Psike Istanbul. He works at İçgörü Psychotherapy Center. He is a founding member of Psike Istanbul Psychoanalytic Association and a past chairperson of the board of directors of this association. He is currently the chair of the Scientific Committee of Psike Istanbul. He has a book titled Faces in the Dark Room (2010), which consists of his articles on psychoanalysis. He is the co-author, with Cahit Ardalı, of the book From Psychoanalysis to Dynamic Psychotherapies (1999). He is one of the co-editors of the books called The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Heinz Kohut (2003) and Knowledge of Spirituality from the Perspective of Science and Philosophy (2006). He has published numerous articles in various journals. He also has a book of poetry entitled A Tabby Who Can Do Yoga (1993). Yavuz Erten is a member of the editorial board of Suret Journal.
From Non-representational Silence to Representations. From the Void of the Negative to the Space of the Positive
According to Green (1998), some memories are repressed and become unconscious; some memories are eliminated. They are destroyed. Their place in memory is hollow. The fact of their non-existence is hollow contours. The repressed ones are already represented. The unconscious structuring has this quality. But the unrepresented are the unstructured unconscious. I am of the opinion that what was repressed in the previous generations (i.e. what had already attained representation) gradually loses its structuring and representational properties in the unconscious in the process of transition to the next generations and becomes black holes in the psyche. In this way they are intellectually silent but manifest themselves as chaotic and blurred affective dynamics. The affective dynamics that remain from major traumas are the “nameless dread” of Bion (1962); the “unthought known” of Bollas (1987). Taiana (2014), in her article analyzing the complex process of mourning experienced by the relatives of those who disappeared during the dictatorship in Argentina, emphasizes the concept of “absent-presence”. While death is already a phenomenon that is difficult to represent mentally, the fact that the lost ones disappeared in this way and that it is not even known whether they are dead or alive leaves a very heavy “negative” burden on the rest. “Negative” requires symbolizing a phenomenon not from its existence but from its ‘absence’. The locomotive phenomenon on the road from the negative of non-representation to the positive of representation is the libidinalization of curiosity. Under the guidance of curiosity in both individual and community psyche, the gaps created by black holes and silences turn into spaces where representations are born. As psychoanalysts, the most common dynamic we encounter in our work in our rooms is the second or, more often, third generations lying on our couch, guided by their curiosity, trying to fill the gaps in the unrepresentational puzzles left behind by previous generations. The centenary of the Republic of Turkey bears witness to the efforts of new generations, both on an individual and community level, to make the repressed conscious, to construct and represent what has been destroyed. In the studies accompanying such efforts, disciplines such as psychoanalysis, history and sociology converge. Biray Kolluoğlu’s presentation “Making Meaning from Silence and Emptiness in Social Sciences” will be discussed on this conceptual ground.