Main description:

This book employs a philosophical approach to the "new wounded" (brain lesion patients) to stage a confrontation between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology, focused on the issue of trauma and psychic wounds. It thereby reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather at its center.

The "new wounded" suffer from psychic wounds that traditional psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the psyche's need to integrate events into its own history, cannot understand or cure. They are victims of various cerebral lesions or attacks, including degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Changes caused by cerebral lesions frequently manifest themselves as an unprecedented metamorphosis in the patient's identity. A person with Alzheimer's disease, for example, is not-or not only-someone who has "changed" or been "modified" but rather a subject who has become someone else.

The behavior of subjects who are victims of "sociopolitical traumas," such as abuse, war, terrorist attacks, or sexual assaults, displays striking resemblances to that of subjects who have suffered brain damage. Thus today the border separating organic trauma and sociopolitical trauma is increasingly porous.

Effacing the limits that separate "neurobiology" from "sociopathy," brain damage tends also to blur the boundaries between history and nature. At the same time, it reveals that political oppression today assumes the guise of a traumatic blow stripped of all justification. We are thus dealing with a strange mixture of nature and politics, in which politics takes on the appearance of nature, and nature disappears in order to assume the mask of politics.

Contents:

Preamble Introduction Part One: The Neurological Subordination of Sexuality Introduction: The "New Maps" of Causality 1. Cerebral Auto-Affection 2. Brain Wounds: From the Neurological Novel to the Theater of Absence 3. Identity Without Precedent 4. Psychoanalytic Objection: Can There Be Destruction Without a Drive of Destruction? Part Two: The Neutralization of Cerebrality Introduction: Freud and Preexisting Fault Lines 5. What Is a Psychic Event? 6. The "Libido Theory" and the Otherness of the Sexual to Itself: Traumatic Neurosis and War Neurosis in Question 7. Separation, Death, the Thing, Freud, Lacan, and the Missed Encounter 8. Neurological Objection: Rehabilitating the Event Part Three: On the Beyond of the Pleasure Principle--That it Exists Introduction: Remission at the Risk of Forgetting the Worst 9. The Equivocity of Reparation: From Elasticity to Resilience 10. Toward a Plasticity of the Compulsion to Repeat 11. The Subject of the Accident Conclusion Notes Bibliography