Le don et son enigme

The author questions the French adjectives “strange and 'familiar' inspiring himself from Freud's lexicological approach used in his article “the uncanny” published in 1919, entitled in French “L'inquiétante étrangeté” after Marie Bonaparte's influence. This famous article marks a climax of theoretical in-between: on the one hand, the narcissistic love put at the center of the psychic life as a reflection of the self-image; on the other hand the awareness of the considerable influence of the repetition compulsion, avatar of the death drive theory inducing the notion of “eternal recurrence”. He then raises the question: isn't the uncanny the essence of psychoanalysis as summed up hereafter by Pontalis?: “what does not belong home but yet stays home”, i.e. the otherness. Finally, it is the merchandizing and managing scientistic era as opposed to the notion of gift, offering, sacrifice and sacred that is questioned. Considering the therapeutic techniques used requiring organ, tissue and cell donation this issue not only applies to the inter-individual field but also to the post-modern sociomedical one.