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Manuela Fleming, a member of the Portuguese Psychoanalytical Society, offers us a thorough and enticing examination of a subject, which, while a common enough presence in the daily practice of every psychoanalyst, has on its own been granted little attention in the specialized literature. The concept of mental pain itself is an elusive one. It can either mean the expression of an actual experience, or work as a metaphor for a particular emotional state, according to the various uses that different psychoanalysts give to it. The author proposes, in this work, to focus on pain as a specific mental phenomenon that warrants a relevant conceptual status within the theoretical body of psychoanalysis. To that purpose, she suggests a provisional definition of mental pain: ‘[It is] a limitrophe phenomenon, situated in the frontier between soma and psyche, a constellation of undefined feelings of longing, helplessness and distress, to which the subject is unable to ascribe words or representations’ (p. 142). Two aspects of this characterization, which she considers later in the book, are the contiguity of soma and psyche and the representability of emotional states.
Reflecting on the boundaries between physical and mental pain then leads to the far more comprehensive subject of the continuity versus discontinuity of psyche and soma. That pain is simultaneously a psychological and somatic phenomenon is generally accepted. It is essential, however, to make a distinction between the two levels and to identify the possible transformations of one into the other. The author cites Joyce McDougall (1980), who believes that distinction to be brought about by the ability, acquired by the human being in the course of his development, to represent his experiences in a symbolic way, that is, to fashion a linguistic code whereby affective and sensorial experiences can be named. César Botella, on the other hand, favours the idea of an oscillation, since the ego withdraws cathexis from the ob