Freudian Theory
Tolga Theo Yalur, PhD
Cognitive Philosopher. Psychoanalyσto Library
theoyalur@gmail.com
Freudian Theory
In the week of this audio-lecture in the Fall 2023, the Israel-Hamas war begun. The media covered the war with psychopolitical word-choices. Why Hamas and not Palestine, not Gaza? Instead of the war and conflicts, I lectured about the relevance of psychoanalysis for the psychopolitics of the war for Israeli and glocal reality, which concerned an Israeli dissensus instead of the ongoing war and various conflicts. Hamas, for instance, used psychological terror more than brutal one, which was obviously not covered in the mainstream media. Sigmund Freud’s relevance was missing in Israel’s psychopolitical reality, founded in the post-war world. How do countries go through stages of reality as the time goes by? Why not compare Israel to Turkey in a psychopolitical sense, which was found in the interwar world? How do the “identities”, psychologies and realities were ideologically or politically informed in the decades that followed after they were found? I claim that Freud’s relevance is not merely individual but his work is as powerful a founder of psychoanalysis as the founders of Turkey and Israel. Maybe more.
Freud was the leading Jewish name of the time, “a Godless Jew from Austria,” he called himself. Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud was mythologized as a child psychologist following World War II into Anne Frank myth, along with the establishment of the Israeli State in the UN. The myth could be compared with the Turkish one of the time, Kemal Ataturk adopting an Armenian-Turkish girl who became the first female pilot in history. The myths abound since then. Moreover, Freud’s Wit in his pre-war book Der Witz has that freudian pronunciation sounding as if “dervish”, as well as his last work posthumously published, Der Man Moses, sounding like “cure” and “my sound” or even connoting Mozart and Turkish language. Freud’s only taped “sound” is from a BBC interview in English, the year the war started. He sounds like sending a message with his witty writing and speech. He lost his life the year after.
The Freudian slip is when the sense goes somewhere else, if not the addressed, which would otherwise be resolved. Of course, this is not constrained to intra-politics in any country because there is glocal politics, treaties in there which might have been preventing publicizing the psychopolitical reality or the Real in Lacanian sense.
The tragic and devastating event that took place enduring the WWII Turkey was the Wealth Tax (Varlik Vergisi), orchestrated by the state that sought to systematically and financially stand ready to fight and disempower “non-muslims” or apostates, mainly Greek and Jewish communities. The Turkish strategy during the atrocities of the war was to leave the message of “varlik”, literally meaning “existing” or “being alive”, “to buy for one’s life in the form of tax”.
The Greek Genocide was another dark chapter in a continuation of systemic genocides and ethnic purification strategies carried out by the Ottoman government against various minorities, including Armenians and Assyrians, as the new republic, founded by Ataturk, sought to forge a homogeneous Turkish national identity. For sure, the Greek Genocide involved a multi-pronged strategy of mass evictions, exile, forced labor, systematic massacres, and other brutal acts of violence to the Greek civilians on a massive scale. The denial of such acts severely weakens the historical reality of these horrific events by Greek, Armenian, and Jewish families.
“A letter always arrives at the destination,” is Lacan’s Freudian motto. Lacanian interpretation necessitates a teleological sense of the message, that is, the meaning is tied to the origin even when it is not. Discursively, that’s the most formidable word-play: the teleological cause, interpreted with comprehensive logos. In the beginning of Freud’s discourse, there is no trace of reference to life. There is a single discourse from which he teaches, that of the hysterical. Freud’s discourse of the hysteric triggers desire, and leaves this desire unsatisfied. Freud discovered a ‘sense’ in this discourse. And this sense, compared to everything that has been evaluated so far, is different. It is the jouissance. In Jacques Lacan’s view, this is the meaning of joy in French, with a hyphen: the joui-sens. There is no single remark of the beloved welcomer who cannot be denounced what the threads of jouissance leads. The representation, up to and including the non-conscious, is not connected to Lacan’s jouissance of the Other. Unlike the myth of Eros evoked by Freud, this jouissance of the Other is not possible at all. The myth concerns being one. Under no condition do two bodies make one. All they say is “Keep an eye on my shoes!” (includes “ear” in Turkish). No one ever tries to fit into someone else’s shoes. No sort of reduction to “one”, which is the treat of psychoanalysts, who “speak the truth”.
Both Freud and Lacan’s analysands were all from affluent backgrounds from France and Austria, and their findings were more applicable to limited groups. In spite of everything, psychoanalysis reveals and unpacks everything, beginning from the narrowest, the most minute detail. If not, there is absolutely nothing to do in psychoanalysis. The psychoanalyst may want humans to be well, not be the so-called “normal”. To get well, for psychoanalysts, means to be well in especially human reports. Freud’s failure might be an extraordinary case in psychoanalysis and humanity. For Lacan, the failure was the unavoidable value of psychoanalysis.
Proxy Wars
[edit | edit source]The word-grouping “Proxy Wars” is a symptom of failure in addressing the message. These wars are the indirect contentions among powerful countries like the United States, China, Iran, Russia, avoiding direct conflict or fight. Instead, they just transfer all their “feelings”, if that's the right word to use, to less powerful countries like Syria or Ukraine, and the Israel-Hamas war is not an exception. There are a few psychological, psychogeographical levels to these proxy wars, which might even include real humans, scholars and journalists who keep silent in case there is a turning point in the narratives. I think psychological dementia is one of the reasons why Israel is criticized a lot because of using excessive power over Gaza. That's already symptomatic in the public discourses of country leaders.
Add the coronavirus with a theory of disbelief more than what has been framed in the media. These proxy wars sound like post-truth media conspiracies that have been changing a lot. The origin of the coronavirus in the Western mainstream media were “bats” and all those narratives and mythologies around the bats, then lab-grown virus leaked by a scientist and so forth. “Bat Scenario” is interesting to make a psychoanalytic case that Lacan and Freud would envy. The French word for “bat” is chauve-souris. A deconstructive psychoanalytic reading would rearrange the words like “chauve is rous” (hairless is rat), sounding like “hairless Russian rat” or something similar. Not true, for sure, though it could be the Real. If the Real symptom, then the “Russian deep state” might have “legitimized” the war in Ukraine, having learned that Russia is left without an “heir”. A return to the Chernobyl decade in a landmass designed by Vladimir Lenin for the communist case that it was “bettering capitalism”, not destroying the good of it.
In the winter of 1955, Jacques Lacan wrote an article on the variations of psychoanalytic cure for the l’Encyclopédie Médico-Chirurgicale to answer the question as to what is psychoanalysis? He writes from the outset that it is “a question of bat” and that psychoanalysis must examine this bat on day one. Lacan meant that the psychoanalyst has a double belonging, indulging himself with the elusive postures that “bat” in the Fable of La Fontaine, “Bat and the Two Weasels”, in which a weasel finds a bat in its nest and prepares to eat it, the bat saves its life by defending from being a mouse saying “I'm a bird. See I have wings,” and then a bird: “I'm a mouse. Viva the rats!” Ten years after this fable, because of the excessive neologisms and inventions, Lacan was banned from the very orthodox international psychoanalytical circles. During that time, he re-identified with the bat, saying that he was then “speaking of a place no longer entirely in the inside and of a place which we do not know if it is the outside.” Both bats and psychoanalysts are oriented by sound and not by vision. Indeed bats are equipped with an echolocation system that allows them to move in darkness. They're able to measure their distance from objects by interpreting the echo of ultrasounds they emit with their ears and noses. Like Lacan did, he had very big ears, and Freud’s nose was big enough. Following the excommunication, Lacan started his notorious return to the Freudian theory, which meant reading Freud from the source without the “failures” of the Freudian wit, writing and speech.
To simplify all the post-truth politics around these proxy wars, even if it’s not the Cold War, I’d make a case with two beer brands Duvel and Corona coupled with two films. Stanley Kubrick, Jewish American atheist and Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Christian director, whose disbeliefs and beliefs are evident in the films. The latter’s Stalker (1979), instead of Solaris (1972), would make the case study in comparison to the former’s 2001 (1968), if not the Clockwork Orange (1971). Since these proxies continue, Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995), the adaptation of Chris Marker’s 1962 photoroman film La Jetée, would work to compare with other films. Agnès Varda’s photodoc Salut les Cubains (1963) would definitely be an avant-garde myth of all the films I list.
“Myths are structured as a language that people talk. There is no meta-language. All the so-called meta-languages are presented with language.” J. Lacan
Lacan started his lectures in the 1950s with Freud’s writing techniques indeed. Married to a controversial Jewish actress as if he inherited psychoanalysis from Freud and the Mom, he was also going to be considered a “charlatan”. Well, Lacan was socially and economically privileged, and most of the jargon he adopts from mathematics is meaningless outside of what he did with those. In that sense, Lacanian math is absolutely meaningless though practical in theory and for representing the psyche that was never logically depicted.
Lacan made sense of that which Freud may not have described in his writings and writing techniques: Freudian notion of reality, symptoms and unusual, the repression of what is not expressed in language. The feeling of otherness that differs from the most common, the most ordinary, the most familiar. The unheimlich is the symbolized feeling at the moment when these appearances are not usual, not intimate any more. It is somehow excursive, but not repressed at all. Freud conceived this feeling as something that is not repressed, that remains excursive. The irruption of the unusual is closely connected to the verbal symbolism. Imagined from the outside, the characteristic of repression is always an affect. In this, words comprise the consciousness of the world.
Lacan’s neologism as an inheritage of Freud is not surprising. He invented jouissance, the French word-play juis-sense, for the deferral of meaning in language of psychoanalysis, specifically that of Freud. Lacan described and suggested jouissance instead of pleasure because of the lack in the sense of the beyond the pleasure, the Ode to Joy on the way to death. Instead of the usual pleasures, jouissance concerns life and death and how the unconscious desire and joy are structured around the truth of life-death. Lacan’s interest in Freud's language also included the addressee of the speech, and if the meaning arrives at the addressee. Of course, who did Freud address had turned out to be a question. “The unconscious is structured like a language,” is Lacan’s conclusion. Cognitive science affirms this.
Freud manifested that in the unconscious reality, there are symptoms, missed acts, inscriptions. These are symbols that are even specifically organized in language, functioning from an equivalent of the signifier and the signified: "the very structure of language,” expressed Lacan (1953). The experience, the essence of psychoanalytic speech is the trespass of the forces that give balance to being human: the objet (a). The symbol of the objet (a) is “the object there”. When the object is no longer there, it is incarnated in duration, devoid of self. The object is there for the individual, all the while. Here is the report of the symbol to the fact that all that is human is considered as such. The Real manifests itself not only in the analytic experience if the notion of symptom was introduced. Before Freud, Marx revealed that the symptom is the sign of the wrong in the Real.
The Symptom
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Freud of The Future of Illusion (1927), a critic of belief, religions and God, was writing from a psychoanalytic view aged enough to be wary of the fact that it was prone to “mistrust” and “ill-will”, that the haters of it would say “We see what psychoanalysis leads to. The mask is off; to a denial of God and the moral ideal, just as we always suspected”. Freud underlined that, despite the ill-conceived efforts to destroy psychoanalysis, it was capable of forming a world-view. Freud’s allegory is that calculus would be targeted since it is used in physics to illustrate the destruction of the earth, and that the same would be for psychoanalysis for using what Jacques Lacan re-described as the Real, which is concealed in culture but spread to the reality. Concepts here are abstractions of material realities, and the quests to target concepts for what they reveal would yield what is diagnosed: the real destruction. The same logic applies to when Freud warned about the future of beliefs as illusions: the more access to the science, “the more widespread the severance from religious belief”. Psychoanalysis was not destroyed, but beliefs suffer in the 21s century to the degree of the warning: the real self-destruction.
The psychoanalytic conception of reality as an illusion conditioning the subject is what Jacques Lacan reworked, based upon the sign, more or less demonstrating the equivalence of these three in a hole that is the symptom, which is strictly unthinkable. The symptom is what would at least be a departure, what would make a hole in the register of language. For the Freud of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), the gag that turns on the word is the slip of the tongue. Freud requires the minimum of overdetermination for a symptom in psychoanalysis, which constitutes the sense of a symbol in a conflict that is defunct beyond its function in a present conflict, which is no less symbolic.
Sigmund Freud was a tenacious atheist, suspicious of beliefs, religious, ideological or philosophical. He pointed out the inextricable connection of illusion to belief (Freud, 1927). Psychoanalysis is the Freudian genius, denouncing any need for belief and religions as powerful means of mobilizing the unconscious, provoking and manipulating the subject. The need for belief is anchored in the human difficulty in renouncing the idealized objects and confirming disillusioning the world. The concept is closely linked to the ideas of secularization and modernity.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud had questioned the materiality of the metaphysical in the unheimliche , the unusual feeling that differs from the most usual visages. The unheimliche is the symbolized feeling at the moment when these appearances are no more intimate. The irruption of the unheimliche is closely connected to the affective in the verbal symbolism. There’s no God, there’s only the word for the God. Freud alludes to writing and differences that create the absence-presence pair with reference to cognitive tools such as the Wunderblok (Freud, 1924). The difference of absence to presence, presence to absence. They are never separate indeed in Freudian theory. That’s why the repressed idea or feeling returns unusually, through the symptoms of what is absent and in the spaces where it is present. The absence of the repressed in this sense is not represented but represenced in traces. The magnet under the surface of the tablet keeps the inscribed magnet dust on the surface in symbolic forms. The surface could be undusted but the traces of the previous symbolic forms could be discerned. Because humans use these cognitive tools, they are allegories of the human mind for Freud.
In the Freudian Theory, the loss of a loved one causes an inner void, which must be filled through creative activity. There are traces of thee loss in language and realms of representation. It is intuitively humane to make a conscious sense of loss, that is, to express and represent grief and lack to contain it in mind. Creativity structures the loss via the logic and structure of meaning to capture the lost object in the folds of language, living on in different forms, marking on a page, as a complex re-assemblage of signs, as a lasting trace of meaning and beauty. For Freud, a fundamental level of creativity is a means of containing the ephemera of Eros, seeing "sublimation", i.e. the ability to invest the energy of the libido in artistic, scientific, cultural or intellectual quests and objectives to transform passion and affect into calmer commitment to a more "civilized" existence, in order to defend oneself from the destructive influence of Thanatos. Freud emphasized that among the various strategies of happiness, "sublimation" is the most reliable, since it redirects the search for satisfaction from external objects (over which we have little control) to the inner resources. The challenge here is to change our instinctual goals so that we do not encounter frustration from the outside world. This does not mean that creativity plays a role in denying loss. In Distillations (2018), Mari Ruti showed that attempts to deny the loss only perpetuate the illusion that freezes life. She did not believe that creativity could “heal” or “repair” loss in any definitive sense, since it can only temporarily heal wounds. Nevertheless, it seems logical to hypothesize that creativity has the power to tame the sharpness of loss by weaving a protective veil of symbols and signifiers around the wound of absence.
The Freudian Wit of Izmir
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When representation is seen "as translation work rather than mere reportage," says the communication scholar Barbie Zelizer in Visual Culture and the Holocaust (2000), it would work metaphorically incomprehensive rather than a complete index. This is "the frailty of representational codes into our own expectations" of what each of these code should do. In other words, Zelizer is underlining the fact that representational codes of any economy of culture and wisdom would tend to assimilate the represented into its own nomoi (νόμος), and that the debate needs to go beyond these "preferred" plans that privilege "the factual over the the represented, and silence the alarm bells that tend to ring when representation tugs at reality." These warning signs divide the visual representation into maintaining the visual's underprivilege compared to the verbal or into elevating the visual forms beyond representations. While revealing the question of the indestructibility of the unconscious desire to mark its essential character in representation, reiteration and reproduction that cause the unrest in civilization, Freud was not walking down a spiritualist path but questioning the structure of discursive determining the economies of these representational codes, the cultures of reality and the symptoms of these disturbances. In psychoanalytic theory, discourses structure reality, functioning where the specular report to the media and culture is pressing.
This psychoanalytic notion of discourse would help rationalize the symptom on the web of reality around Kültürpark in the modern Izmir, the site of the final stage of the Greek Genocide that was built on part of the neighborhoods that went on fire in Smyrna in the final stage of ethnic cleansing that decimated the ancient Anatolian Greek communities in 1913-1922. The object of my research, Kültürpark, is not far from my academic interests and published research on cognitive philosophy, specialized with the psychoanalysis in cultural practices, visual studies and irreligion. Though the word “genocide” has been treated as an interdisciplinary reflection in the humanities and cultural sciences, the psychoanalytic contribution to the symptoms of the Real in genocides would be unavoidable in my research. The Greek Genocide has been shrouded in silence and denial in the hegemonic, official and media narratives in Turkey and Greece, with the traumatic experiences of the Greek dismissed or minimized, or transferred to other questions or the others’ questions at best. As is well known, psychoanalytic method goes beyond the sphere of material praxis in medicine and into all that concerns the unconscious of the double-coincidence of the Real, the one that denies part of reality and the other that is the mad component of all belief and ideology, has led to the elucidation of the functions and avatars of these constructions both on the subjective and trans-subjective plans. Hundreds of thousands lost their lives or went missing, and mostly the Turkish migrants from Greece and Balkans repopulated the city. Formally acknowledging the Greek Genocide, would not merely be a symbolic act, in preserving the memory of the victims, ensuring their stories are told, and paving the way for a more comprehensive history that does not whitewash or distort the truth.
The Greek Genocide involved a multi-pronged strategy of mass deportations, forced labor, systematic massacres, and other brutal acts targeting Greek civilians on a massive scale in the Ottoman, ending with the early republican Greek-Turkish War in the early Republic of Turkey. The Greek state waited until the 1990s to recognize the Greek Genocide, which remains in question internationally. The final stage of a decade of systematic campaigns of ethnic cleansing that decimated the ancient Anatolian Greek communities took place in Izmir, also known as the Smyrna Fire: an event that unfolded in 1922 during the wars. Trapping terrified civilians, the fires raged for days, spreading to the neighborhoods in the city center, followed by the fires in other neighboring districts. Mostly Greeks and Armenians lost their lives or went missing.
τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδέν
Everything is flux, nothing abides.
Σοφία είναι να γνωρίζεις την αρχή που κυβερνά τα πάντα.
Wisdom is to know the origin of what governs everything.
δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης.
You could not step twice into the same river.
Τα σκυλιά γαβγίζουν σ’ αυτό που δεν γνωρίζουν.
Dogs bark at what they do not know.
The unconscious psycho-cultural approaches contribute to the construction of fictions and beliefs within human groups. In psychoanalytic concepts of psychic truth, construction and belief, these problematize the comprehension of the real. The word “post-truth”, for instance, is incompatible with both democratic debate and anticipation, reaction and adaptation to a physically changing reality. Psychoanalytic conceptions of delusional constructions, illusions, the explanation of religious beliefs and constructions in reality analyses lead to understanding the discursive regimes relating to the concealed and veiled as the Real, the collective productions of the unconscious capable of shaping cores of psychic truth which are not publicized. These “reality fictions” solicit the unconscious dynamics for those who adhere to them would represent a distorted and displaced way of expressing what does not find a representation in shared fictions. Politics necessitates interpreting differently and wanting to change common prior descriptions and prescribed fictions of the world. No change is the reproduction of the illusion and status-quo, when reality is what the extreme right-wing discourse always wants to describe in the collective unconscious.
(How) does the information on the web of reality (local, global, international) inform the conscious and unconscious symptoms around the park? Is the available information enough to have an answer about the reality of the site? Are the logics in what I describe as the informative discourse predetermined before it informs about the Real? The informative discourse of the sight and sound; visuals, texts and sound is one of the areas to see the formulation of the fictions of the Greek Genocide, predominantly constructed through pre-learned and pre-coded affects, genres and stereotypes. The sight and the sound, the heareable and the visible concern the affect of the symptoms reveal themselves in the informative fictions from Greece, Turkish and international communities. When Freud questioned the affect in his description of the unheimlich, the unusual, the feeling of otherness that differs from the most common, the most ordinary, the most familiar sights and sounds – excursive and not repressed at all, closely connected to the verbal symbolism (J. Lacan “Du Discours Psychanalytique” 1972). The question for informative discourses would be if there are any ideologies and economy-politics involved in these constructs of the truths of the genocide. Affect plays a crucial role in these constructs, especially in fiction and music, such as the era films about the Greek and Turkish communities in Izmir, shared realities through music. The affect of the sight and sound would be verbalized in the symbolism that represents, for example, labels and moods chosen in constructing realities around the genocide in general and the Smyrnan Fire in particular. The web of reality concerns the context of Turkey and how discourses situates the Greek Genocide internationally. Even the Greek state could censure a film on the fire of Smyrna in the 1970s. What I describe as "the informative discourse" has the symbolizing mechanism to register, diagnose, detect, decode the patterns or patternize how the Smyrna Fire was informed and represented in visual, textual, official and media. The information is both conditioning and conditioned by the hegemonically prescribed information.
The Real condition is a symptom, questioning the forms of post-truth fiasco in the work of culture and the crises of shared structures of meaning, underlining the necessity to conceive human constructs and mindsets critically. A founding myth of the occidental episteme, psychoanalysis posed the spiny question of how living in the illusion of beliefs linked to the human condition would be free by knowing what silences, expanding and extending this reflection with the tools from psychoanalytic experience, with regards to the construction of belief and alternative truths that unfold in the psychic life of the individuals and groups. In the USA of the 1960s, more of a multitude of news channels and social networks could, say, spread the news of "the Entry of Soviet cats into Cuba". How would that have been perceived? Of course, there were no Soviet cats entering Cuba for real. What is necessary for a democracy is common-sense, a shared world dealing with what is sacred in a number of statistical data. Similarly, in Turkey of the 1950s, mainstream news media could spread the fake-news "The birth-house of Ataturk in Salonika in Greece is bombed." And in a matter of days, the poor leftovers of the Turkish-Greeks who had been dispossessed via the Wealth Tax and the like, following the genocides, would be forced to leave the land they were living for millennia after their houses and shops were demolished and looted in the pogrom.
Doubt is in the method to reformulate or formulate a new truth or another truth. That is to say, adjusting the truth. In these informative fictions, there is a democratic incompatibility. There are numerous other possible ineffability that are no less important, all of which have the same sources. The exposure of inequalities in the Ottoman and Turkey obviously concerns very different statuses that render it extremely difficult for the public interest in the Greek Genocide. What does it mean to be “Turkish”? Were the Turks the last ethnic group of the Ottoman to build a nation-state? Are there any Greekness or other ethnic traits hidden and assimilated in the construction of the national identity of Turkishness? That’s where Freudian critical mind, his wit would make the doubt work. He pointed out the inextricable connection of illusion to belief. Psychoanalysis is the Freudian genius, denouncing that the need for belief and religion is a powerful means of mobilizing the unconscious, provoking and manipulating the subject. As such, the Ottoman conceived muslim Greeks as Turks, which was a reason why a lot of non-muslims converted especially during the war to count as “Turk,” and avoid death. The need for belief is the human difficulty in renouncing the idealized and confirming to disillusioning the world. The concept is closely linked to the ideas of secularization and modernity.
Driven from their ancestral homelands, millions of Greeks were forced to flee westward, enduring harrowing journeys of displacement and death marches that claimed countless lives, hundreds of thousands. Those who remained behind were subjected to horrific atrocities – mass killings, forced labor, sexual violence, and the destruction of Greek cultural and religious sites. Convert Greeks remained on the mainland Anatolia as a part of the Turkish identity construction in Turkey, and quite a number of greco-turks ended up in Turkey via exchange programs. None of these are recognized in the official language of the Turkish state, assimilated into a unitary and fantasmagorical idea of “Turk”, the mythical visage of Ataturk, “the father of Turks”, who was from a predominantly Turco-Balkan, and watched the major Greek city of Izmir burning at the end of the Greek-Turkish War. Following the war, the textbook mythical rumor about Ataturk's reaction to the end of the mainland Greece's rule in Izmir has it: he refused to walk on the Greek flag laid on the entrance of the governor's mansion in Izmir, demanding equal respect for nation states. The unconscious fictions of the myth represents the fractioned war coalition that were so diverse as to attempt to assassinate Ataturk in Izmir in the following decade. Izmir: First the Anatolian Rums, then the mainland Greece's Turks. It is no coincidence that following the Greco-Turkish population exchange, the city were gradually labelled as "gavur", insulting and controversial word meaning "non-muslim".
For there to be a real published debate, factuality like no otherwise, there should not be fiction. The official recognition of the Greek Genocide would have been a pivotal milestone in the long and arduous journey. The Greek Genocide has been shrouded in silence and denial in the hegemonic, official and media narratives, with the traumatic experiences of the Greek dismissed or minimized, or transferred to other questions at best. Formally acknowledging the Greek Genocide would lay the groundwork for reparations, restitution, and educational initiatives that can help heal the deep wounds inflicted by this genocide, empowering the descendants to reclaim their heritage at the site of the Kültürpark with a museum dedicated to the Greek Genocide in general and its final stage of the Smyrna fire in particular. The Freudian idea of sublimating the loss into a museum derives from the humane inclination of investing in creative representation of the loss. Grief would have been the extreme at this time.
Tolga Theo Yalur, PhD
Cognitive Philosopher. Born in Izmir, Turkey, Tolga Theo Yalur studied Economics at METU (Ankara) and Cultural Studies at GMU (Fairfax, VA), and taught media and culture courses in Turkey and the USA, at GMU, Bosphorus University (Istanbul), and the New School (NYC). He publishes openly at the Psychoanalyσto Library on the advances of and the troubles with cognitive sciences, ideologies and religions.
