Jacques Lacan: on the psychosomatic phenomenon

Psychoanalytic psychosomatics

Abstract

The article is the first to analyze the theme of psychosomatic in the works of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Through the prism of the clinic of pleasure and desire, it is shown that the psychosomatic phenomenon is understood by J. Lacan not as a symptom, which is the formation of the unconscious, which is the encryption of meaning. Rather, it is the result of the coercion of the body, which is used by the Other at the expense of the subject. Its appearance is determined by the appearance of one of the pleasures in front of one of the signifiers. Following Lacan, the features of diseases with and without organic lesions are differentiated, it is shown that he considers them as mental traces written (applied) on the body. For psychoanalysis, the key question is how to consider a symptom: as a sign or a signifier? Is a psychosomatic phenomenon not a symptom, but a form of writing, a record of a mental event?