The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (Forms of Living)

This book employs a philosophical approach to the "new wounded" (brain lesion patients) to stage a confrontation between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology, focused on the issue of trauma and psychic wounds. It thereby reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather at its center. The "new wounded" suffer from psychic wounds that traditional psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the psyche's need to integrate events into its own history, cannot understand or cure. They are victims of various cerebral lesions or attacks, including degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Changes caused by cerebral lesions frequently manifest themselves as an unprecedented metamorphosis in the patient's identity. A person with Alzheimer's disease, for example, is not--or not only--someone who has "changed" or been "modified" but rather a subject who has become someone else. The behavior of subjects who are victims of "sociopolitical traumas," such as abuse, war, terrorist attacks, or sexual assaults, displays striking resemblances to that of subjects who have suffered brain damage. Thus today the border separating organic trauma and sociopolitical trauma is increasingly porous. Effacing the limits that separate "neurobiology" from "sociopathy," brain damage tends also to blur the boundaries between history and nature. At the same time, it reveals that political oppression today assumes the guise of a traumatic blow stripped of all justification. We are thus dealing with a strange mixture of nature and politics, in which politics takes on the appearance of nature, and nature disappears in order to assume the mask of politics Contents 9 Preamble 11 Introduction 23 PART ONE The Neurological Subordination of Sexuality 43 Introduction: The “New Maps” of Causality 45 ONE Cerebral Auto-Affection 51 TWO Brain Wounds: From the Neurological Novel to the Theater of Absence 68 THREE Identity Without Precedent 79 FOUR Psychoanalytic Objection: Can There Be Destruction Without a Drive of Destruction? 89 PART TWO The Neutralization of Cerebrality 97 Introduction: Freud and Preexisting Fault Lines 99 FIVE What Is a Psychic Event? 107 SIX The “Libido Theory” and the Otherness of the Sexual to Itself: Traumatic Neurosis and War Neurosis in Question 123 SEVEN Separation, Death, the Thing, Freud, Lacan, and the Missed Encounter 143 EIGHT Neurological Objection: Rehabilitating the Event 164 PART THREE On the Beyond of the Pleasure Principle—That It Exists 185 Introduction: Remission at the Risk of Forgetting the Worst 187 NINE The Equivocity of Reparation: From Elasticity to Resilience 193 TEN Toward a Plasticity of the Compulsion to Repeat 211 ELEVEN The Subject of the Accident 225 Conclusion 233 Notes 239 Bibliography 267 This book addresses the issue of trauma and psychic wounds to stage a confrontation between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology. In so doing, it reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather appears as its very locus. A philosophical approach of the "new wounded" (brain lesion patients) forms the matter of the confrontation.