Discussion Concerning Dr Pierre Marty's Paper

We can't get away from narcissism! Psychosomatics itself is rooted in narcissism. It is narcissism to believe in our self-destructive powers! There seems to have been, on the individual level, something of what is happening on the collective level, what is happening for the psychosis of the year 2000, as our late colleague Schiff called this monumentally narcissistic notion that human beings were powerful enough to blow up the planet with an atom bomb!

M. Held's Contribution

My warm congratulations to Dr Marty for his fine lecture and the skill with which he has climbed from the specialized clinical terrain, familiar mainly from our hospital practice over the last several years, to the highest summits of knowledge itself. I freely admit: until now it had hardly occurred to me to apply to the field of psychosomatic medicine a methodology that proves so necessary in addressing the major problems of biology and psychology, which are both concrete and analytical in their epistemological aspects.

This leads me to wonder if, to return to the title of the paper we have just been given, the narcissistic difficulties encountered by the observer in psychosomatics are specific in nature or whether this is merely a fact of a very general kind. Now it certainly seems that identical difficulties appear in what are reputed to be the most exact sciences. There are very few theories and experiments into which the observing subject's affectivity, and particularly his narcissism, do not intrude.

In numbers theory (do mathematical entities exist beyond the counting and calculating mind?) in the transition from deductive mechanics and a priori to experimental mechanics, for example, in extending the application of Carnot's second principle (of the depletion of energy), narcissistic resistances long delayed the acceptance of a science that casts doubt on the unity and eternity of matter (see , Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique, p. 305 et seq.). A fine ex