ABSTRACT
The word ‘stigma’ is historically of clerical origin and formerly indicated the amazing fact that the wound-marks of the Christ were transferred to believers by the efficacy of fervent prayer. At the period of witch trials insensitiveness to contact with red-hot iron was held to be a stigma of guilt. This chapter presents and comapres two case examples of hemi-anaesthesia. Common to both cases is the exclusion from consciousness of touch stimulation, along with the preservation of the other psychic uses of this stimulus. In the anxiety hysteric, the insensibility of one half of the body was used to employ the unconscious sensations elicited by contracts and altered positions of this half of the body for the ‘materialization’ of the Oedipus phantasy. One distinction between ‘stigmatic’ and traumatic hemi-anaesthesia can be drawn according to the part played in them by ‘physical predisposition’.
