Absence.

In September 2022, for the first time, it seemed as though I felt absence for real. I came to the University Department where I had worked for more than twenty years, and instead of my friends and colleagues, I found holes. The space around me seemed eaten away. At that moment I recollected Stephen King’s Langoliers; I felt with all my senses absence, holes in space and time. All of a sudden, my dear friends had disappeared. It was not the absence of the language capacity of humans. It was not Derridean absence as what is repressed by the metaphysics of presence. It was not the negativity of psychoanalysis in the epoch of wild positivism. It was not a Lacanian lack giving possibility to breath. No. It was pain and despair in the face of the uncanny unbearable absence, as if a helpless child had lost his hope for mother to return.

Victor Mazin, Ph.D., is a practicing psychoanalyst. He is the founder of Freud's Dream Museum in St. Petersburg (1999) and an honorary member of The Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles). He is the head of the department of theoretical psychoanalysis at the East-European Institute of Psychoanalysis (St. Petersburg), and associate professor at The Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University, honorary professor of the Institute of Depth Psychology (Kiev). He is also a translator from English and French into Russian, and was editor-in-chief of the Kabinet journal and member of the editorial boards of the journals Psychoanalysis (Kiev), European Journal of Psychoanalysis (Rome), Transmission (Sheffield), Journal for Lacanian Studies (London). He has published numerous articles and books on psychoanalysis, deconstruction, cinema and visual arts.