Журнал психологии и психотерапии
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The Body of Libido and The Imploded Organ-Some Reflections on the Economy (and on the Topography) of Libido on People Affected by Cancer

Paolo Cotrufo and Riccardo Galiani

We found, in an empirical study on 53 people affected by cancer, of both sexes, that, according to previous researches, they take on a peculiar defensive style. The defensive styles differences between cancer patients and the comparison group resulted, by the mean of State Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI) and Defense Mechanism Inventory (DMI), statistically significant. The cancer patients resulted to be “controlling-introverted”. These results can be considered an additional evidence of a tie, till obscure, between the somatic disease, even in its extreme form, and the subjective psychodynamic organisation. Such evidences are often the result of a research activity referred to traditional studies leading to the different meanings of “psychosomatics”. As we can see from the epistolary relation between Freud and Groddeck and the latter and Ferenczi, this tradition crossed lot of times the path of psychoanalysis. In some cases, such crosses seem to produce a deviation, evident in the frequent simplification of the potential senses of the same crosses. We think with no doubt that the link body-mind can be studied with advantage starting from the same idea of the unconscious presented by Freud in the famous letter to Groddeck (1917) as the possible “missing link” between the physical and the psychical. However, we think that a study starting from such a point should not limit itself to seeing in the unconscious collocation of the link an almost nominalistic entity, pushing the knowledge towards the “more” implied in the unconscious nature of the link. Starting from those empirical data we propose a representation of the elements in transit on the bridge linking the mind to the body affected by cancer. We want to consider the relationship between the self-conservative body and the libidinal body in the light of a “critic” to the anaclisis (Anlehnung) theory.