Creative Hypochondria

The medical approach to an intractable symptom often follows the following dual line of questioning: Is it of organic origin? Is it a psychic manifestation? This litigious duality underlies many endless debates on the question of the origin of symptoms and it is curious to note that a writer like Jean-Jacques Rousseau built part of his reflections around this line of reasoning to the point of sometimes getting lost in it and of not fearing the contradictions arising from this reasoning, even including the persistence of a procedural behaviour and a sensibility of someone who feels persecuted. In spite of that, as is often the case with him, he remains congenial for the reader because his painful questioning converges with our own when faced with physical ailments, great or small: hoping to find meaning in them is already part of the process of healing, often far removed from any scientific truth.

Rousseau's writing is haunted by evil and the quest for its origins, but it is also infiltrated by the account of physical pains and, ultimately, raises the question of salvation. His experience of these questions was intense and his thought was influenced by the dimension of persecution that marked his relationship to the world and, first and foremost, to the torments linked to the functioning of his body. Rousseau, somewhat complacently, often gives many details about his suffering or about his states of illness, but always with a certain reserve and a veil of mystery that maintains a distance between himself and what he is recounting: he is in search of a healer or an interlocutor in order to feel understood, but equally exhibits an attitude of proud refusal; he thus wavers between discretion and the exhibition of his states of suffering. “I came into the world almost dead;” he writes, “they had little hopes of preserving me.” (Rousseau, 1790 [1783], p. 5).

This situation made it possible for him to meet a figure who is very present in the Western world, namely, a sufferin