The symbol of fire in ancient Greece was the title of the thesis my grandfather would have written, had he not been killed by a bullet on the Romanian front in Odesa during the Second World War. I cannot help but think of him and of our political times writing this essay, which is an indirect ode to him as well as to all the fires of knowledge that run through generations, despite all fires that seek to extinguish it.

The Book of Revelation ends with the image of lakes on fire, with the whole of creation submitted to a final, absolute burning. Apokalypsis, meaning, from Greek, unveiling, is stripping away appearances in order to expose the only element honest enough, since fire never deceives. Apocalyptic desires and the images they produce are, in their prophetic way, describing the return of the repressed on a theological and geopolitical level. When rebels put cities on fire, they too enact the return of the repressed – the tightly intertwined forces that live in all of us – Eros and Thanatos, the will to create and the will to annihilate.

We’re all Plato's prisoners, sitting in our caves with our backs to the flames, preferring to look at their shadows on the wall rather than getting dragged into the full light of the sun and getting blinded. The fire behind the prisoners is, for Plato, the false light, the origin of simulacra that must be transcended on the way to pure reason, perhaps the origin of art too? Psychoanalysis also begins in this cave, in the gap between what we believe we are doing and what the inner fire is doing to and with us. Gaston Bachelard depicted flames in The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938) as the first object of reverie. Before the child can even name it, it reaches for it, but prohibition arrives. Fire is one of the first forbidden things a child is confronted with – the original object of transgressive longing. Fire thus isn’t only the source of our illusions but also what enables us to descend into a truth of a different order. The truth of unconscious desires.

When Prometheus steals fire from the Gods in order to redistribute it to mankind, he pays a high price for his rebellion. An eagle tears his liver out each morning, yet he doesn’t repent. Bachelard calls this the Prometheus complex: the drive to know as much as one's father, to surpass one's teachers, to seize what has been withheld. For Bachelard, fire is the meeting point of love and death, of respect and transgression. To watch fire is already to philosophize. But Bachelard goes further and describes also another complex, namely the Empedocles complex: the desire not to steal the fire but to become it. Fire is not only burning; it’s also dancing and, in Sweden, where I spent many years of my life, we used to dance around bonfires at midsummer. Fire is everywhere – in the Freemason temples, in the Diwali lamps, the candles on the birthday cake, around the campfire where the first stories were told. We gather around fire to remember who we are but also what we risk being thrown into – the flames of hell. The same flames that devoured the first feminists – the witches and all kinds of scientists who wanted to penetrate the secrets of nature. They were burned since they were identified with its unruliness. But long before the Enlightenment formalized the Promethean project, fire was understood as a deity, a messenger between worlds, the ultimate instrument for sacrifice.

Fire walk with me is perhaps one of the most mysterious phrases in cinema history. And what does it mean in fact? The Black Lodge, Lynch's name for the unconscious, is lit with a quality of firelight. The evil in Twin Peaks does not arrive from outside; but from the accumulated fire of unacknowledged desire and unspoken violence in a small American town that presents its perfect surface to the world. Laura Palmer burns from the inside. The fire walks with her because she has been carrying the fire that others refused to acknowledge in themselves. She is the scapegoat, the sacrifice, and the symptom, all at once; the one who burns so that the town's surface can remain intact. The apocalypse in Twin Peaks is not external. It is the unveiling of what was already there. The question is then not how to extinguish the fire, but how to walk with it. And the hardest revolutionary act is not to light the fire but to sit with it, unpack, entertain it, and learn from it.

In our current political moment, this reading feels unbearably precise. The fires of populist rage, guilt, and humiliation burning across Western democracies were already smoldering beneath surfaces we collectively agreed to admire. The wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and Sudan are the return of fires long suppressed by diplomatic silence, by convenient forgetting, by the comfort of distance. What we call a geopolitical crisis is often just the town finally smelling the smoke it produced for decades. The deepest challenge of this moment is not to defeat an enemy but to resist the temptation of extinguishing the fire before we have understood what it is trying to say.

When the instinctual life has been too long suppressed, when the fire of the psyche has accumulated without outlet, the inner apocalypse becomes inevitable. Civilization is built on the management of psychic fire, but the management can become its own catastrophe when it tips from channeling into suppression. Doing an analysis in this light is a controlled burn, the deliberate, supervised release of the accumulated fire before it becomes an inferno. Fire equals desire. If we suppress it, it bursts out; if we unleash it, it can devour everything.

In the alchemical furnace, fire is the ignis mercurialis – the mercurial, transformative fire that operates in the psyche as it operates in the alchemist's laboratory, calcinating, purifying, and reducing matter to its essence. Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century physician and mystic, saw fire as the force that separated the pure from the corrupt in both bodies and souls. For him, healing and burning were almost the same gesture. What the alchemical tradition encodes in its strange imagery is something that psychoanalysts later discovered: that the fire of the unconscious does not stay where it is put; that the psychic transformation requires heat, requires the willingness to sit with discomfort, to maintain the right conditions, and resist the urge to extinguish the process before it is complete. The inner fire is powerful, beautiful, mesmerizing, hypnotic in a way that no other natural phenomenon quite replicates because it is never still, never quite predictable. The flickering, irregular movement of flame appears to induce genuine changes in brain states. Fire thinks differently than we do. And when we watch it, for a moment, we think like fire.

Freud himself associated fire with libidinal energy and argued that civilization is built not on the elimination of those drives but on their laborious, always precarious transformation. How do we live with the consequences of fire? By not rebuilding what burned as if it never burned. That is the great lie of our times, the idea that the surface can be restored, that the town can look clean again. But the ash is part of the soil. The first act of living with fire is to stop pretending that the ground beneath us is not scorched. To name what was lost.

Sometimes, we must burn things down, guided by an ethics of destruction in the service of renewal. Longleaf pine forests, Australian eucalyptus, and South African fynbos evolved because of fire. Periodic burning clears deadwood, releases nutrients, and triggers germination. Indigenous communities across South America, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand practiced controlled burning, accepting that some destruction is not only inevitable but necessary.

The fire of the unconscious and the fire of the geopolitical world are not separable. Both burn what has accumulated for too long; both illuminate what would rather remain in darkness. Both require us to pay careful attention to what we want to burn and what we want to preserve, remembering, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, that the flame that illuminates also destroys those not ready for it. His entire philosophy concerns what happens to the human being who looks directly into the fire of existence without the protective screens of religion, morality, and metaphysics. The death of God is the burning away of the largest protective shield Western civilization had constructed. What remains is the question of whether the human being can, as Nietzsche hoped, become something that warms itself at its own flame rather than borrowing heat from external sources.

Fire also teaches us something about our artworlds. The postmodern apocalypses of the 90’s put accent on a destruction without renewal. But something has shifted. Contemporary artists have turned the apocalypse inside out. Today's artistic imagination is eschatological in the fullest sense: it believes in endings because it believes, more urgently, in what endings make possible. New worlds, unlearning, repair, non-violence, and the slow work of entertaining the fire of resurrection. The ancient Greeks had a name for this: ekpyrosis, which meant the periodic conflagration in which the entire cosmos is consumed by fire and reborn from it. Fire is the necessity condition of renewal, like phoenix who raises from its ashes. There is something almost liturgical in this. Fire as ritual, as threshold, as the necessary passage between what was and what could be, incarnating in itself a true paradox: the force most capable of destruction is also the force most necessary for renewal.

Fire is finally confronting us with a final, complex point, that Jacques Lacan touches upon in his interpretations of the dream of a burning child that Freud analyzes in The Interpretation of Dreams. A father, keeping watch over his dead child's body, falls asleep and dreams that the child appears to him saying, “Father, can't you see I'm burning?” He wakes to find that a candle has fallen and the shroud is on fire. For Lacan, the burning child dream is about the impossible – the “real” breaking through the screen of representation. The father wakes not because of the actual fire but because the dream touches on what cannot be symbolized. This is the ultimate lesson that we can draw from psychoanalysis: that language and its symbols fail us sometimes, and what burns through is the real. And the real doesn’t want to arrive, to communicate, to be understood. It just wants to burn.

Sinziana Ravini
Psychoanalyst, art critic and writer.

• Climate of History
• Planetary Commons
• Indigenuity
• Four (or Five) Elements Theory
• Temporality and Temporariness