ABSTRACT
The psychoanalyst, in bearing witness to the effects of speech directly on the body, the body as penetrated, carved up, and intensified by language, encounters a body that has no correspondence to the medicalised body. There was once a time-honoured line held between the doctor and the psychoanalyst, historically respected and held intact. The demands of the doctor, the demands of the state, the demands of a patient who identifies as sick, are frequently brought to the psychoanalyst’s consulting room upon a raft of misguided assumptions. The resistance to cure might be thought of as a hedonic and spontaneous articulation of that aspect of the symptom specific to psychoanalysis. When the discourse of the psychoanalyst has the effect of unfettering desire from the very chains of production, which extend and reproduce it under new names, it is sometimes reviled for the discomfort this produces in those habituated to avoiding discomfort.
