Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Newsletter – Autumn 2017 111
The symbolic features heavily in Koukis’ writing, signifying
that he is a Lacanian analyst at heart. Lacanians hold that analysts can
only produce changes in the imaginary effects by working through the
symbolic order. Mainly, because the imaginary is characterised by
dual relations, images and appearances, which are merely effects of
the symbolic. The imaginary, symbolic and real constitute the three
orders of Lacan’s tripartite scheme. We encounter theoretical and
practical examples of how the symbolic is linked to communication,
law and order, and ultimately, regulates desire in the Oepidus
Complex, on numerous occasions.
‘Desire in postmodern times has lost its symbolic form and
is nothing but a disguised form of need and demand, which is no
longer repressed.’ What does Koukis mean? By linking desire to the
decline of the paternal law, the ideal father, or in Lacanian
terminology, the Name-of-the Father, he suggests that some causes are
to be found in society’s paternal order, which is expressed through
social institutions. To function creatively, desire must always be
repressed. Since this is no longer the case, and he links desire to the
Mother-as-thing (need and demand), false needs are created. He
attributes this to consumerism, arguing that desire is the need to buy,
to devour the commodity. Koukis’ creative amalgamation of Lacanian
and group analytic thinking is intriguing.
Several of his conceptualisations can be traced back to Lévi-
Strauss’s structuralism. The social world is structured by certain laws,
which regulate kinship relations and the exchange of gifts (in form of
communication). The circuit of exchange is fundamental to the
symbolic and linked to law and structure. This symbolic, which is
diametrically opposed to Freud’s symbolism, is the realm of culture,
linguistics, law and order. Characterised by triadic structures (death,
absence, lack), the symbolic order is autonomous, determined by the
subjectivity of the pleasure principle.
I can see why Koukis places so much emphasis on the
symbolic, it has explanatory power. And so has his book. It reminds
us that theory and practice are inseparable; that theory evolves out of
practice, which is modified by further practice. This cycle finds its
expression in the presented clinical and theoretical material. We
witness how the group becomes a container for members’ undigested
psychic disturbances and projections. Being lured into the realm of the
imaginary, real and symbolic, the dream matrix and music, we are
invited to follow group members’ journey from the oral-sadistic over
the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position. At their final
destination, the resolution of the Oedipus Complex triumphs over