Tome XIX, no. 1 - 2026 (10)
EDITORIAL / Gabriel Balaci
Abstract: This issue brings together contributions that illustrate the diversity and
vitality of contemporary psychoanalytic thought. Beyond the plurality of
theoretical perspectives and clinical approaches, these studies converge
around a fundamental question: how can the fate of the subject be
understood in a world under pressure from technological, cultural, and
geopolitical transformations, where affect, alterity, and the capacity for
thought are continually put to the test? Without relinquishing the conceptual
rigor that defines the psychoanalytic tradition, the authors demonstrate that
psychoanalysis remains a privileged framework for exploring the individual
and collective psychic phenomena of the present.Read more
1 - Argument on the theme / Georgiana Dobrescu
Abstract: For some time now, we can say with certainty that we have been living
through extreme situations and phenomena. Multiple conflicts – political,
interethnic, and religious – along with discrimination of every kind have
become part of our daily reality. As for violence, several wars are unfolding
around us, showing no signs of coming to an end; if anything, they continue
to escalate. Read more
2 - In memoriam Eugen Papadima / Vasile Dem. Zamfirescu
Abstract: Eugen Papadima passed away on December 25th 2025. His contribution to
the development of psychoanalysis in Romania was remarkable.
Through his didactic-therapeutic interaction with Ion Popescu-Sibiu, he
succeeded in establishing a connection with the interwar generation of psychoanalysts. The activity of this generation, represented especially by
Constantin Vlad and Ion Popescu-Sibiu, is little known, even among those
in the field, yet it marked a major moment of synchronicity with European
culture. Through the twelve doctoral theses in medicine on psychoanalytic
subjects defended in Bucharest and Cluj between the two World Wars,
Romanian culture held an avant-garde position in relation to other important
European countries in the field of psychoanalysis. Eugen Papadima
succeeded in restoring the connection with an important beginning of a
psychoanalytic tradition that the communist regime had brutally interrupted. Read more
3 - Affect in the Time of Artificial Intelligence / Monica Balașa
Abstract: The pathologies of affect induced by Artificial Intelligence may
reach an unprecedented degree of gravity and scope, shaking our
confidence in the future and in the recovery of the past. Without memory we
have no past; without affective substance we have no future. Warnings are
multiplying as individuals become captive to an extinction anxiety – which,
as we shall show, is not new, but has a different mode of reception and a
different freedom of expression. The group psychoses that circumscribe it
are becoming more frequent, as are extreme meteorological phenomena.
The specificity of these psychic phenomena lies in their capacity to annul
affective functioning. Read more
4 - Exploring the Unconscious with Cupid and Psyche / Bogdan Sebastian Cuc
Abstract: The concept of the unconscious, initially introduced by Freud as
an instance of the psyche and later, with the second topographical model,
transformed into a characteristic of the psychic agencies, continues to
preserve within its folds meanings and nuances open to exploration. For
any psychoanalyst, the exploration of the unconscious is a clinical
experience that constantly generates questions and searches for meanings
that are revealed or take shape beyond the appearances of immediate
concreteness. Yet such explorations also take place outside the consulting
room, when we set out on the paths of deciphering unconscious dynamics
alongside artists who have shared with us, through their works, their own
visions or perspectives, which often take the form of enigmas, or which we
choose to regard as enigmas, thus carrying the creative endeavor further. Read more
5 - Figures of Evil – Hatred and the Destructiveness of the Subject / Houari Maïdi.
Abstract: This article develops a metapsychological understanding of evil
grounded in a Freudian framework and illustrated through a
psychoanalytic reading of Macbeth. Building on the work of Sigmund
Freud, the author conceptualizes evil not as a moral or metaphysical
category, but as the outcome of drive disintrication, whereby the death drive
becomes unbound from Eros. Originally structuring, hatred may, under
certain conditions, evolve into destructive annihilation when the object is
de-invested and de-subjectivized.
Shakespeare’s tragedy is approached as a paradigmatic representation of
this process, highlighting the transition from fantasy to action, compulsive
repetition, and the subject’s progressive self-destruction. The model is
further extended to contemporary phenomena such as radicalization,
understood through mechanisms of identification, projection, and collective
disobjectalization. The paper argues that evil reflects a structural potential
within the psyche, revealing the fragility of the cultural binding of
destructive drives. Read more
6 - Perverse functioning has the nostalgic vocation of extremism / Brîndușa Orășanu
Abstract: The article addresses the theme of extremism by starting from the
social meaning of the term, linked to violence and the violation of the law,
broadening its scope, giving it a metaphorical character, and arriving at its
forms hidden within individual pathology, termed narcissistic perversion.
The subject’s neurotic struggle with an internal perverse sector is
highlighted, a struggle that ends either in failure (The Alto Knights, Tár) or
in success (Truth, Group Portrait with Lady). Read more
7 - Aggression and identification – A Post-Winnicottian perspective / Cătălin Popescu
Abstract: The article aims to explore, from a Winnicottian perspective, the
ontogenesis and destiny of aggressiveness. The working hypothesis is that,
by virtue of the very manner in which aggressiveness emerges from the
infant’s undifferentiated vital energy, it represents a fundamental ingredient
in the understanding of alterity, in the construction of a personal ethics, and
in the constitution of a true self.
In a characteristically Winnicottian manner, the author attempts to
reposition aggressiveness as one of the fundamental premises of the
evolution of human intelligence, while simultaneously exploring the
vicissitudes of the adaptation of the social individual’s mind to its
consequences. By postulating an indissoluble triad between aggressiveness,
identification, and intelligence, the hypothesis is explored that intelligence
is a form of nature’s addiction—one that feeds on aggressiveness and, at the
same time, generates it. Read more
8 - Everyone Manages as Best They Can. Commentary on Brîndușa Orășanu’s paper: Perverse Functioning Has the Nostalgic Vocation of Extremism / Bogdan Sebastian Cuc
Abstract: I thank Brîndușa Orășanu for the dense text, laden with condensed
processing and elaboration, which she has often developed with haiku-like
accents. It is a text that invites reflection through analyses offered in small
but concentrated doses, from which we can unroll papyri of integrative
processes of realities whose immediacy is all too familiar to us.
In this brief commentary, I chose to begin with the phrase cited by
Brîndușa, “Everyone manages as best they can”, a formula we hear often
and which suggests to me an attempt to trivialize evil by reducing
conflictual tension to immediate pragmatism, the pragmatism attached to
peripheral survival, through which one can phobically avoid the stratified
shadows of the progenitors of horror. Read more
9 - Ethics, Alterity, and the Psychic Ground of Values On Psychoanalysis and Ethics. The Necessity of Perspective, by David M. Black / Daniela Luca
Abstract: This book review stretches a psychoanalytic reading of
Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective (Routledge, 2024)
by David M. Black, situating Black’s re-foundation of psychoanalytic ethics
in interdisciplinary dialogue with thinkers as Emmanuel Levinas, Sigmund
Freud, Donald Winnicott and Melanie Klein. David M. Black argues that
ethical values are constitutive of psychic reality rather than derivative
psychological structures. Against some positivist and reductionist
tendencies within psychoanalysis, the author proposes an ontological
reorientation in which ethics precedes cognition, symbolization, and drives
dynamic. By dialoguing with Levinas’s conception on primacy of alterity, and Klein’s psychoanalytic theory of depressive position, guilt and
reparation, Black’s clarifies distinctive contribution and examines its
clinical and theoretical implications. This book review fil rouge is that
Black does not replace existing psychoanalytic models but provides a meta-
theoretical framework that prevents the systematic pathologization of
ethical experience. Read more
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