The ill person-body, the hospital and psychoanalysis: contemporary unfoldings?

Abstract

The historical reflection on the ill person-body is a central theme in the consideration of the subject's subjectivity regarding illness and hospitalization in current days. The intertwining among body, culture, history and society is relevant in the production of meanings about suffering, and demands, in turn, a reinterpretation of the helplessness and discomfort that are caused by an illness. The aim of this article is to articulate the ill person-body, the hospital in current times and psychoanalytic listening in order to contribute to psychoanalytic actions, knowledge and thinking in the hospital. The body is analyzed here from its driving dimension, which is linked with representations of the ill and hospitalized body. Interpretation, as an operating method, enabled this rereading through the path of desire. Listening to the desire's subject revealed that the process of becoming ill is an announcer of the intrinsic condition of the human being, the psychic condition of incompleteness, which is a fruitful field for the immersion of the subject in the analysis condition.