The Pharmakon: An Object to Object

Generally, psychoactive medicines are thought to possess the virtue of facilitating, preparing, or even opening the field where analytic working through, or something like it, might develop. It is also argued of “mental illness” that it should be considered a solid, objective, and objectifiable entity (e. g., through objective measurement techniques such as multicentric questionnaires). Therefore, apart from and beyond objectified suffering (or its side of jouissance), the illness is supposed to exist as a foreign body, and the pharmacological object is ready to attack it. Likewise, beyond the signifier (a phobic fantasm, an obsessive ritual, the “pain of being”) lie the neurotransmitters, this new metamorphosis of the old hypothesis of an organic disorder. If the brain must then be considered thought's material support, if the “verifiable facts” command, must then thought itself admit that the power of the neurotransmitters precedes and makes words possible? Should even desire be reduced to the interplay of opiate auto-receptors?

A psychoanalyst working as a Liaison-Consultant at a Public Hospital stands between different worlds, an incessant confrontation between Psychoanalysis and Medicine, between the field where subjectivity may briefly appear as a glimpse and Science, which necessarily excludes the individual. Psychiatry, as a by-product of Medicine that cannot preclude subjectivity otherwise than by trickster tricks (psychoactive medicine being one of the most conspicuous of these), is a controversial affair which shall be questioned here from a psychoanalytic outlook, taking several observations as a starting point.

A Liaison-Consultation is demanded in an inpatient department; the patient has a former diagnosis of bipolar disorder. The interview takes place in her room, where she lies in her bed, her sister at her side. Between them stands the small night table, on top of which is a display of the medicines she takes. These are in adequate correspondence wit