Abstract
In the present paper, we look into what is painful psychical analgesia in relation to what 19th century clinicians have named “moral pain” in melancholia, and more particularly in the delusion of negation described by the French psychiatrist Jules Cotard in 1880, a form of delusion that can be seen mostly in cases of chronic anxious melancholia. This condition is characterized by a painful absence of emotions, which occurs when the subject, in the Lacanian sense of the word, ceases to be touched by the signifiers, and consequently ceases to exist as a subject. Hence, these patients often declare themselves to be already dead or incapable of dying. The psychoanalytical approach to this delusion allows an understanding of the ‘’lack of lack’’ concept, as these patients, having lost the lack, affirm that their body’s orifices are clogged, that they have lost their mental vision, that they miss various visceral organs etc. The completeness of their body – the absence of orifices – can sometimes attain universal dimensions and these patients can thus identify themselves to the universe, which contains everything. The delusion of negation teaches us something important concerning the essence of desire, in relation to what has been named by Lacan area-between-two-deaths. This Lacanian concept refers essentially to the tragic hero, but also, more generally, to the lonely condition where anyone’s desire should be able to exist beyond any narcissistic commitment, which means beyond the pleasure principle as well.
Highlights
According to Georges Lanteri-Laura [1], the term moral pain was probably first used by J
Guislain [2] (1797-1860) in Belgium, in 1833: “In the first place, mental disease is a condition of discontent, anxiety, suffering: there is pain, but it is a moral pain, intellectual or cerebral, depending on how we choose to conceive it
I will look into the most extreme form of this painful psychical analgesia that occurs in a clinical condition, which may develop mainly in chronic forms of melancholia, and which was first described by the French psychiatrist Jules Cotard under the term “delusion of negation”
Summary
According to Georges Lanteri-Laura [1], the term moral pain (douleur morale) was probably first used by J. In Germany, during the same period, Emil Kraepelin [5] (1856-1926), while introducing his own term of manic-depressive psychosis in psychiatry, noted that the depressed is in a condition where he is unable to be emotionally moved, in a state of depersonalization to such a point that even his own body feels estranged: “In addition to the feeling of sorrow, there is an inhibition of the emotional movements which would be the opposite of the maniac’s intense emotionalism It is this particular reduction in the ability to be moved, this loss of intimate interest in events that happen around us, which is principally experienced as painful...,one realizes that the patients are extremely insensitive to bad news. I will be addressing the issue of painful psychical analgesia in melancholia from the, so-called, “lack of lack” point of view
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