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This is a dense and erudite book, one that will be of great interest to those who come to the neuropsychoanalysis congresses—and to readers of neuroscience, who will recognize names such as LeDoux, Damasio, Panksepp, and especially Howard Shevrin (with whom Bazan worked in Ann Arbor, doing experiments in neuropsychology). One hopes that her book will soon be translated into English, offered to a larger public, and open to debate.
With Bazan's interest as a clinician in the Lacanian school of thought, this book will also be of great interest to those who are curious about how Lacan followed Freud and gave a tremendous emphasis to language. From the introduction to the conclusion, Bazan unravels her main hypothesis: that psychopathology is the pathology of the phantom, of the unspeakable but nevertheless transmitted signifier. Like the phantom limb, this signifier, although absent, is cathected with a drive, but its action (or rather, by analogy, its articulation) is blocked.
In her introduction, Bazan also mentions her broader philosophical viewpoint, citing mainly Merleau-Ponty; she hypothesizes a psychic apparatus belonging to an autonomous level or organization of the living, established through emergence at a biological level, and in reaction to a social context. Once in place, it cannot be linearly deducted from this biological level. Through this process of emergence, reversibility from one level to the next is lost, but the psyche enables one to interpret this divide, giving meaning to physiology. Regrettably, this idea is not developed elsewhere, although she does appear to follow Mark Solms's philosophical idea of dual-aspect monism. Indeed, in Bazan's short and dense book, which I will now try to summarize, physiology, language, and the psyche do seem to correspond seamlessly.
In the first chapter, “Affect and the Signifier”, we learn that as Freud (1940 [1938]) wrote in his letter to Fliess on 29 December 1897 with a play on words—Käfer, the beetle/Marienkäfe