How can we make anguish speak when its object is the body itself?

Abstract

This text addresses the work of the psychoanalyst in a general hospital and the issues that arise there concerning the body. We start from the premise that language acts on the organism, transforming it into a body that is shaped by the discourse of the Other, making room for the “advent of the Other through the operation of the signifier” (Lacan, 1967/2003, p. 357). We demonstrate how the subject communicates with their body and, consequently, more than they know, is always waiting for a listener who can hear and interpret the word that is silenced within their own body. We believe that organic illness is not without expressing this speech. This is a speech in which medical discourse is constantly surprised by something that escapes medical order and produces an enigma. Through a clinical fragment of a child hospitalized in a medical institution, we aim to discuss how the body, by manifesting something of the evanescent subject of the chain, can serve as a destination for its own anguish, bringing serious consequences.