ABSTRACT
A man who had been in analysis for a year had been talking in recent sessions about a painting he did a few years ago. One day, he arrived with a large painting with its front side facing his coat. The analyst said nothing and let him organise himself with it. The analysis of a female patient had for a long time presented an apparent oedipal configuration in which the mother's violence and the father's passivity had played a predominant role, particularly in adolescence, at a time when her awakening towards her father had been particularly intense. The relation to the unknown is very present in ideals, whether religious, moral, philosophical, political or scientific, ideals whose realisation is supposed to bring the greatest jouissance, an echo of primordial times. The orientation of analytic treatment around the relation to the unknown leads to prioritising the dimension of the negative, where the focus is on the void, the hollow and loss.
