Şeyda Uncu*
The Floating Body**
My ignored body is disappearing,
I must die as I am, as I am...
Without thinking of friends, parents or any hope
I must butcher this disgusting body with my brain!
Would I know the approaching darkness? Before,
That the life that could be terminated was mine?
I was happy, I was happy,
My laughter used to frighten people!
His time is running out now, of my forced body,
I must die as I am, as I am...
Without thinking of love, bond or any victory,
I must remain rigid!
When the psychosomatic issue is considered, Nilgün Marmara's poem "The Swaying Body" is like an example. In the poem, the words of a person who is at the loss of his body are heard. It is presented as a phenomenon that remains "stiff", as if it were completely disconnected from the body, love, words and the symbolic bond they make possible. In this article, we will touch upon the psychosomatic issue from here.
If we talk about "psychosomatic phenomenon", as Jacques Lacan puts it, it means that we will consider from a psychoanalytical perspective a phenomenon in which the subject is the subject of suffering and experiences its symptom and basic conflict through the body. The fundamental question of current psychopathology is "What is psychosomatics?" We will continue with the question.
Psychosomatic clinic is one of the important clinics that reflect the union of body and soul. Spirit and body cannot be considered separately from each other, and focusing only on spiritual formations or only on the body will make it difficult to understand the individual clinically. Because the subject has begun to see and show the existing pain with his body. What is visible is his physical illness and his words do not include any mental suffering. However, at this point, it is necessary to remember Parman's words: "Every phenomenon we feel has a physical echo, every physical feeling has a counterpart in the spiritual world" (Parman, 2008, p.133). At the same time, if we remember that Foucault named the emergence point of subjectivity in the combination of soul and body, the reflections of this dual distinction between soul and body, which can only be imaginary, on the individual can be severe.
So psychosomati in the principle of reciprocity? How does a subject with symptom k separate the bond between soul and body? Our first observation, which may be an answer to this question, can be expressed as the subject saying "I have a physical disease", saying that the disease comes from outside and reducing this situation to a mechanical level that needs to be "corrected". The individual's life is interrupted by the disease, causing his organs to become "noisy" and hindering his life in an unhealthy way. In this regard, the person begins to feel anxiety and suffering, being caught between the soul and the body. So, more specifically, the question is: "What can be the place of psychotherapy for the individual who says that he is only physically ill?" They need a physician mostly due to loss of health. In this request, the subject announces that he believes that his suffering body can only find a cure around a medical discourse. Even though today's medicine can describe the effects and consequences of these diseases, when the individual does not respond to treatment during the treatment process, medical discourse is removed and the causes are attributed to the psychology clinic. Therefore, the status of the subject of need vis-à-vis the physician changes place and evolves towards the subject of demand, because the physician points out a deficiency and addresses it with his tongue. Thus, the request for psychotherapy, that is, the request for conversation, usually arises at the direction of someone else (physician, etc.). In a clinical study, a patient's request for therapy is expressed as follows: "I want to contribute to my long-standing treatment. It's been a long time, up to 12 years now. I am slowly finishing looking for a solution. "I've been looking for years and I can't find anything, so I'm here to see what the last option might be." As can be heard in the subjective discourse of the patient with Alopecia Areata, which has been going on for 12 years, we hear that he has pushed his body out of psychological treatment and has resorted to talking as a last resort.
In psychoanalytic theory, experiencing the symptom through the body brings to mind two psychopathologies: (1) Hysteria and (2) Psychosomatics. The body, which is at the intersection of the symptoms of these two psychopathological phenomena, always tells something. What the body says by listening to its voice and silence We must listen to what he is hiding and what he is hiding.
Freud revealed the distinction between current neuroses and psychoneuroses in his article "Anxiety Neurosis", which he wrote in 1986. He explains how psychosomatic patients in current neuroses experience illnesses on the body, explaining that, unlike the hysterical symptom, they are faced with a physical illness. While there is a psychological reality and symbolic meaning in hysterical conversion, what is in question in current neuroses is the "lack of meaning" in the symptom. (Parman, 2005) Repression differs from hysterical conversion by being inadequate in psychosomatic symptoms. While the hysterical subject expresses the conflict by using the body as a tool, in the psychosomatic phenomenon the body is the area where repressed emotions and impulses are exhibited as an element of suffering. More clearly, in the psychosomatic phenomenon, with the leap from the spiritual to the body, the subject suffers with his body. According to Freud, the somatic symptom is devoid of meaning. While the symptom causes devastating damage to the body, in conversion hysteria the symptoms are controlled without attacking the body (Debray, Dejous, & Fedida, 2015, p.15). Additionally, in the hysteria clinic, we observe the functionality of psychoanalytic interpretation on the symptom, which is an unconscious formation.
As a result, in cases of hysteria, the excess of libidinal investment in the body is the cause, while in psychosomatic cases, the lack of libidinal investment in the body or its complete withdrawal causes a part or order on the body to come to the fore.
Jacques Lacan: Psychosomatic Phenomenon
Lacan focuses on thought and thought rather than the distinction between body and psyche. It focuses on the importance of the distinction between bodies. Therefore, it is already possible to say that he is working in a different position than the common discourse.
When we talk about phenomena, we hear essential qualities. Objects here cease to be real objects and become ideas. In other words, the object is called essential because it is the phenomenon that emerges in consciousness. In their article titled "Psychosomatic views on high blood pressure" dated 1953, Lacan, R. Levy and H. Danon-Boileu described a specific case of hypertension for which no organic cause was found, based on the psychosomatic understanding of their time. They handle it by remembering. Between 1964 and 1976, Lacan revealed his main works on psychosomatic phenomena.
In Lacan's theory, we can consider psychosomatic phenomena from two different perspectives: First, how the function of the signifier and the signifier chain differ in psychosomatic patients; Then the issue of how we can handle Jouissance (pleasure) specific to psychosomatics.
Firstly, by addressing Freud's interpretation of the symptom, Lacan argues that the psychosomatic phenomenon is not a symptom. According to Lacan, in psychosomatic phenomena, the message differs from the symptom that comes from the subject itself, has a phallic meaning and is therefore related to castration. According to him, psychosomatic phenomena do not represent the subject and are therefore the differentiation of the chain of signifiers. Here the signifier loses its original position in the dialectics of desire and becomes a pure sign. He explained this situation with Pavlov's experiment in Seminar XI: He argued that Pavlov acted with the desire to know and in this way he was able to represent his own desire. The signifier of this desire (the bell) represents it (Pavlov) as subject for another signifier (saliva). This salivation is also felt as a sign of the body getting what it wants (jouissance). With the presence of an ulcer in the animal's stomach, a residue (object a) is produced. Thus, the lesion that carries the experimenter's additional satisfaction—an excess of pleasure—confirms the initial hypothesis. In Lacan's mathematical formulation, it is expressed as follows:
(S1) is the sound of the trumpet. ???? (S2) secretion, fruition (satisfaction/realization)
(S) Pavlov (a) Ulcer (Valas, 2010).
The animal responded to the stimulus (bell) with a physiological function here. . Behind this answer, the ulcer appearing in the animal's stomach took its place not as a signifier, but as a pure sign (Castanet, 2004). We argue that psychosomatic patients also respond with their symptoms to those that have no meaning on their own and that impose themselves on them in the form of needs.
Lacan, in his seminar on the four basic concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964): “the subject emerges in the Other as the first signifier, appears in the field of the Other as a single signifier, and is seen as another.” He states that "it represents the subject in the eyes of the signifier, and the effect of that other signifier is the aphanisis of the subject" (Lacan, 2013, p. 231). To put it more clearly; The subject is represented by one signifier for another signifier. Lacan transfers psychosomatic phenomena to clinical methods and argues that when the basic need of the body is disrupted, the subject cannot defend himself against the desire command of the Other and his persistent desire can cause bodily lesions. The subjective metaphor therefore remains unsuccessful. At this point, he proposes the concept of "holophrase", which is an important definition in the differentiation of the signifier and signifier chain.
The word "holophrase" is a rarely used concept in linguistics. It literally refers to a situation that consists of a sentence with a single long word. Lacan defines the concept of holophrase as "equivalent to an incomprehensible noise that occurs between two people talking face to face." ' (Lebrun, 2001). In order to handle the holophrase, it is necessary to talk about S, S1 and S2. "Lacan writes the signifier-event with the symbol S1. The number 1 is to indicate that this is a unique event - a symptom is always One It is of the same order as - and the letter S indicates the word signifiant (Nasio, 2007, p. 24). S2 represents unconscious knowledge. Therefore, it is the articulation of unconscious signifiers in a series. Lacan defines holophrase as these signifiers. It is defined by the absence of the distance between them.If there is no space left between S1 and S2 in this series, the first signifier duo S1-S2, which plays a fundamental role in the division of the subject and the formation of the unconscious, freezes and becomes holophracellar, that is, they become solid. In other words, the concept of holophrase means that the first pair of signifiers is frozen. Freezing of this first pair of markers can result in very different clinical presentations. Many cases such as mental retardation, psychosis and psychosomatics are encountered, but the subject will be positioned differently in each (Lebrun, 2001).
When we talk about the formation of the unconscious, Lacan will also reference the definition of the object "a". The small object a is the one that constructs the subject with the formation of the unconscious and directs the subject to desire. What the subject desires
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