Auto-immunité et ambivalence du corporel. Sur l'importance d'un rapprochement entre psychanalyse et médecine

Medicine and psychoanalysis converge on the same subject, the body and its suffering in disease. The resulting “splitting” of the body illustrates the complex relationships between these two practices, concerning their different thoretical basis and clinical approach. A specific exchange and transmission tool could, nevertheless, help to establish a dialogue between these approaches. Such a tool for a possible dialogue should consider some theoretical, logistic (concerning the hospital and its particular organisation) and political aspects (related to the normative definitions of health and its alterations). Although, this medical basis for a dialogue between medicine and psychoanalysis should respect the “ordinary” language: only the patient's language can constitute a pathway towards the multiple senses that make life possible. All these aspects, clearly recognisable in the clinical experience, have not always a well-developped theoretical basis. Aiming to give a place to subjectivity through the psychoanalytical work, the present article, based on a psychoanalytic collaboration experience within an immunology and rhumatology unit in a General Hospital in Santiago in Chile, explores the immunological concept of “Self” as well as the psychoanalytic construction of the body.