ABSTRACT
Early in his work, a patient described how he organized his life in such a way as to “smooth everything out”, to reduce to a minimum all perceptual, sensorial or motor excitation because it caused him chronic and uncontrollable pain. Hanna, the heroine of The Secret Life of Words, a 2005 film by Isabel Coixet, has become absent from her own existence. This is the fundamental characteristic of essential depression, associated with a lowering of vital tonus. It is only when he tells her about a traumatic episode of his own life, expressing it with emotion albeit not without humour, that a breach opens up in Hanna's defensive shell. Reanimating a patient who suffers from essential depression requires taking an interest in him, thereby providing him with an erotic source as well as the means to make use of it to bind the effects of the destructive impulses that inhabit him.
