A woman in her forties comes to a psychoanalyst on the advice of a doctor, she is diagnosed with breast cancer. She speaks calmly, does not seem surprised or frightened. The psychoanalyst has a special feeling: something absent appears in her words …
A woman in her forties comes to a psychoanalyst on the advice of a doctor, she is diagnosed with breast cancer. She speaks calmly, does not seem surprised or frightened. The psychoanalyst has a special feeling: something absent appears in her words. There is no feeling of fear or psychological pain, which would indicate the importance of the event and the danger it poses to the patient. This oddity, which the analyst feels instead of the patient, is an important sign. Attention to this kind of signs is the result of the work of the Paris School of Psychosomatics, within which the term “operatuary thinking” arose, that is, concrete, pragmatic, characteristic of people who do not fantasize. Their symptoms, unlike neurotic ones, have no symbolic meaning. Claude Smadja, MD and psychoanalyst, chief physician of the Institute of Psychosomatics in Paris, expands the term to the concept of «operatuary life», which includes two more components: essential depression and operatuary behavior. Having given in the introduction a detailed digression into the history of psychoanalytic research on somatics, he proceeds to his own reflections and description of specific cases. “How can the onset of a serious illness lead to the development of an affective state that clearly qualifies as a narcissistic high, when rather a state of fear and even despair should have been expected?” the author asks. In his work, he seeks to resolve such paradoxes and identify patterns of mental functioning of somatic patients.
Kogito-Center, 256 p.