Toxic Relationships: Desire, Lack, and the Repetition of Suffering

A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach

The ILPPD Institute invites you to a seminar with Petros Patounas exploring the complex

dynamics of toxic relationships through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

In contemporary discourse, “toxic relationships” are often framed in terms of dysfunction,

incompatibility, or emotional harm. Yet such explanations, while valuable, remain

incomplete. This seminar proposes a different question: not simply why these relationships

are painful, but why they persist.

Drawing on key psychoanalytic concepts such as desire, lack, jouissance, and repetition,

this seminar will examine how individuals may find themselves repeatedly involved in

relational patterns that produce dissatisfaction, yet remain deeply compelling.

Participants will be invited to reconsider familiar relational phenomena - including

emotional unavailability, intense beginnings followed by withdrawal, and cycles of conflict

and reconciliation - not as accidental outcomes, but as structured dynamics tied to

unconscious processes.

Through clinical-style examples and theoretical insights, the seminar will address:

• How desire is organized around lack rather than fulfillment

• The role of the Other in shaping self-worth and validation

• The paradoxical enjoyment found in suffering

• Why certain relational patterns repeat across different partners

• The subjective position one occupies within a relationship

Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, this seminar aims to open a space for reflection

on one’s own involvement in relational dynamics, and the unconscious structures that

sustain them.

Presenter: Petros Patounas, Lacanian Psychoanalyst

Language: English

Date: 13/06/26

Time: 6pm

Location: Zoom Platform (online)

Fee: 30 euro