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Marilia Aisenstein is the European representative of the International New Groups (ING) Committee of the International Psychoanalytic Association, of which she was Vice-President. She has also been the President of the Psychoanalytic Society of Paris, of which she is a full member and training analyst. In addition she is a member of the Hellenic Society of Psychoanalysis, and a full member and training analyst of the Pierre Marty Paris Institute of Psychosomatics. Many of the clinical accounts she presents in her new book, Désir, douleur, pensée. Masochisme originaire et théorie psychanalytique, come from her experience as a psychoanalyst with patients with serious physical illnesses.
These clinical accounts, always remarkable, alternate with summaries from literary texts. Literature and clinical practice inform each other, and help readers to understand the new ideas that the author brings to psychoanalytic theory. Unlike neurotic patients, the patients with severe somatic conditions whom Marilia Aisenstein treats psychoanalytically do not complain about the impossibility of fulfilling their desires. They simply avoid desiring, protecting themselves against the objects that could excite them.
At the age of 32, Carla has already had surgery for breast cancer and has had two strokes. She is a professional sportswoman, who has no love life, and who fell ill when she had to stop her intensive physical training following a fracture. After a year of psychotherapy, she reports a first dream: “a landscape of snow, neither cold nor hot”. She then reveals that she has lost her sense of cold and heat since her first period at the age of 12. Her analyst points out that she has been anaesthetized. Carla then speaks for the first time about the death of her father, which occurred at the same time, as well as the mistreatment she suffered from her mother, who beat her and received her lovers in Carla’s presence. It took Carla’s anaesthetized pain to turn into suffering, and into ma