Eros and Melancholy

Lecture: Eros and Melancholy

Lecturer: Sarantis Thanopulos (Italian Psychoanalytic Society)

Date: Friday, October 23, 2026, 6:30 p.m.

Place: Monte Verità (Ascona), Auditorium

Cycle: Eranos-Jung Lectures 20265 - Guided by the Daimon. James Hillman's (1926-2011) Legacy on the Hundredth Anniversary of his Birth

Language: Italian

Moderator: Fabio Merlini (Eranos Foundation, Ascona / SUFFP, Lugano)

Followed by discussion with the audience and aperitif

The video recording of the conference will be viewable on the official YouTube channel of the Eranos Foundation.

Lecture Presentation

Human beings are marked, both in terms of natural and cultural evolution and in terms of ontogeny, by an original lack of self-awareness: they are born without the ability to be self-sufficient and dependent, so that they do not fall into meaninglessness (the loss of the sense of existing among existing things) from their co-constitution with other subjectivities and with the natural world. In the course of their evolution, the primary relationship with the mother has become central to their ontogenesis. It is within this relationship, which becomes the reference point (both metaphorical and metonymic) for all direct or indirect relationships with their living environment, that they conceive themselves illusorily, thanks to the great constancy of maternal care, as one with the world and as a being in themselves. In this way, the original objective lack does not intrude into its subjective ontogenesis, deconstructing it. The loss of the constancy of maternal care, necessary for the emerging human subject to occupy a place in the world that is not only illusory, is the moment when one finds oneself ‘mutilated by the mother’, experiencing the loss of what was experienced as part of oneself and is emerging as other than oneself. This is the truly melancholic moment of our existence: the original lack can be contained and experienced as a livable loss of something that is in transition between the Self and the outside of the Self. If the mother remains present in the bond, together with the rest of the world, the distance between oneself and what is outside oneself becomes the melancholic space of the lack of the other that pushes the emerging subject out of its center of gravity. The lack of the other makes desire the force that extroverts the subject to life, inextricably linking Eros to melancholy. The original lack of being becomes the melancholic-erotic form that shapes our real existence: being in the lack of the other.

Lecturer' Bio-bibliography

Sarantis Thanopulos, born in Greece, is a psychoanalyst specializing in psychiatry who lives and works in Naples. An ordinary member with training functions of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), he was its president from 2022 to 2025. His research mainly concerns the transmission of psychic pain across generations, the dream space of experience, Greek tragedy, the variations of sexuality, the relationship between psychoanalysis and femininity, and between psychoanalysis and society. He has published the following books: He has published the following books: Metasicologia oggi (with Olga Pozzi, 2005), Eredità della tragedia (with Andreas Giannakoulas, 2006), Ipotesi gay. Materiali per un confronto (with Olga Pozzi, 2006), Lo spazio dell’interpretazione (2009), Desiderio e legge (with Fabio Ciaramelli, 2016), Il desiderio che ama il lutto (2016), Psicoanalisi delle psicosi. Prospettive attuali (edited by Riccardo Lombardi and Luigi Rinaldi, 2018), Verità nascoste. Riflessioni inattuali sulla vita comune (2018), Il diavolo veste ISIS. Lo straniero di casa (2018), La solitudine della donna (2018), La città e le sue emozioni (2019), and the most recent Il pensiero affettivo (with Ginevra Bompiani, 2024). He has collaborated extensively with the newspaper il Manifesto and currently collaborates with the Huffington Post.

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In 2026, the Eranos Foundation intends to honor a figure who has brought prestige to the history of its meetings. This figure is the American psychologist James Hillman (1926-2011), whose 100th birthday is being celebrated this year. A highly regarded speaker at the famous Eranos Tagungen on several occasions, his innovative and courageous thinking contributed to the cultural renewal of analytical psychology, developing Jung's intuition of archetypes in unexpected directions and decisively returning the psyche to its imaginal role—more than a terrain to be interpreted, a horizon to be recognized and inhabited. This year, as we did last year with Carl Gustav Jung on the 150th anniversary of his birth, we do not intend to study Hillman analytically, but rather to be inspired by some of his most disruptive perspectives, allowing them to interact with the issues that concern us most today. The result will therefore be a very free and open dialogue with relevant aspects of his thinking, with the aim of shedding light on the current situation. Each speaker will thus be inspired as they see fit by a style of thinking that has taken psychology beyond the strictly clinical dimension, making it a heuristic tool for better understanding society and individuals. This is the lesson we will try to take advantage of.