ABSTRACT
Pierre Marty was a psychiatrist and a full member and former president of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society. He was keenly interested in contemporary psychosomatic practice with Michel de M'Uzan, he developed the concept of 'operational thinking' and emphasised the importance of economic aspects. Operational thinking thus seems to us to lack any discernible libidinal quality. It also severely restricts the externalisation of aggression; it is unable to subtend the sado-masochistic dramatisation. Operational thinking can thus be found in a fairly wide range of clinical pictures, but it is useful to consider it in isolation, as a symptom, because it has enough stable characteristics of its own to be identifiable, as we will now seek to demonstrate. The clinical illustration we will present is drawn from the complete report of a psychosomatic interview conducted at our consultation in Professor Marcel David's service.
