Sandrine Detandt

On the physiology of jouissance: interpreting the mesolimbic dopaminergic reward functions from a psychoanalytic perspective

Jouissance is a Lacanian concept, infamous for being impervious to understanding and which expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that a subject may derive from his symptom. On the basis of Freud’s “experience of satisfaction” we have proposed a first working definition of jouissance as the (benefit gained from) the motor tension underlying the action which was [once] adequate in bringing relief to the drive and, on the basis of their striking reciprocal resonances, we have proposed that central dopaminergic systems could embody the physiological architecture of Freud’s concept of the drive. We have then distinguished two constitutive axes to jouissance: one concerns the subject’s body and the other the subject’s history. Four distinctive aspects of these axes are discussed both from a metapsychological and from a neuroscience point of view. We conclude that jouissance could be described as an accumulation of body tension, fuelling for action, but continuously balancing between reward and anxiety, and both marking the physiology of the body with the history of its commemoration and arising from this inscription as a constant push to act and to repeat. Moreover, it seems that the mesolimbic accumbens dopaminergic pathway is a reasonable candidate for its underlying physiological architecture.

A French Translation of the Pleasure Arousal Dominance (PAD) Semantic Differential Scale for the Measure of Affect and Drive

Multivariate studies have repeatedly confirmed that three basic dimensions of human emotional behavior, called pleasure (P), arousal (A) and dominance (D) are persistent in organizing human judgments for a wide range of perceptual and symbolic stimuli. The Mehrabian and Russell’s PAD semantic differential scale is a well-established tool to measure these categories, but no standardized French translation is available for research. The aim of this study was to validate a French version of the PAD. For this purpose, (1) Mehrabian and Russell’s PAD was translated through a process of translations and back-translations and (2) this French PAD was tested in a population of 111 French-speaking adults on 21 images of the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). A confirmatory factor analysis revealed the expected three-factor structure; the French PAD also distributed the images in the affective space according to the expected boomerang-shape. The present version of PAD is thus a valid French translation of Mehrabian and Russell’s original PAD.

The Grand Challenge for Psychoanalysis and Neuropsychoanalysis: A Science of the Subject

In 2011 we proposed that the modern advances in neurosciences would eventually push the field of psychology to an hour of truth as concerns its identity: indeed, what is psychology, if psychological functions and instances can be tied to characterized brain patterns (Bazan, 2011)? As Axel Cleeremans opens this Grand Challenge with a comparable question1, and as there is growing disagreement with the “I am my brain” paradigm, we think that the topic is indeed, 5 years later, crucially at stake. We had, in 2011, contextualized this question, as one driven by the advances in biology—anatomy in the sixteenth century, (neuro-)physiology in the nineteenth century and neurosciences today. Indeed, with each major advance, decisive moments came for psychology: in the sixteenth century, the name psychologia was launched, in the nineteenth century, psychology became a full-blown scientific field, and today, its specific identity is being questioned (Bazan, 2015). It now appears indeed that it is neuroscientists themselves, who formulate the possibility of a science of representational life, which is autonomous as regards to its biological substrates. For example, the neuroscientist Etienne Koechlin in a conference in Paris on February 2nd, 2016, gave as an alternative definition for neuroscience “the mechanisms and computational operations which govern the mental representations independently from their material substrate and its content2”.We will further propose that this autonomy is to be regarded as an organizational autonomy. However, as psychology does not for now claim a clear identity of its own, it seeks refuge in the medical model when it comes to being practiced, i.e., as concerns clinical psychology, mainly. This has largely underestimated societal consequences. Indeed, the medical model is not adapted to the specificities of mental health (Bazan, 2013). Crucially, for example, the first intervention tool in mental health is the therapeutic alliance between patient and therapist (for review, see Wampold, 2001), and this is more important than the specific technique3, while in medicine the specific technical interventions are decisive for the treatment. We have proposed elsewhere (Bazan, 2013, 2015) how this medical model has a substantial counterproductive effect, creating, and sustaining

Smoking addiction: the shift from head to hands: Approach bias towards smoking-related cues in low dependent versus dependent smokers

The dual process theory is central to several models of addiction, implying both an increase of stimulus salience and deficits in inhibitory control. Our major aim is to provide behavioral evidence for an approach bias tendency in smokers and more specifically during smoking cue exposure. The second aim is to examine whether this bias differs in low-dependent versus dependent smokers. Thirty-two smokers (17 low dependent and 15 dependent; cut-off FTND of 4) and 28 non-smokers performed a modified Go/NoGo task using tobacco-related words and neutral words as stimuli. Smokers generally made more mistakes and tended to be faster for smoking-related cues specifically. Low dependents acknowledged more their dependency in declarative questionnaires while making more errors and being slower specifically on smoking cues; dependent smokers were less prone to indicate their addiction, but were faster and accurate when it came to picking the smoking cues. These results suggest that a shift has operated from a mental preoccupation with smoking in the low-dependent group, to smoking as a motor habit in our dependent group. This finding invites experts to rethink smoking addiction in the light of this crucial moment, namely, the shift “from head to hands”.

The mark, the thing and the object : on what commands repetition in Freud and Lacan

In Logique du Fantasme, Lacan argues that the compulsion to repeat does not obey the same discharge logic as homeostatic processes. Repetition installs a realm that is categorically different from the one related to homeostatic pleasure seeking, a properly subjective one, one in which the mark “stands for,” “takes the place of,” what we have ventured to call “an event,” and what only in the movement of return, in what Lacan calls a “thinking of repetition,” confirms and ever reconfirms this point of no return, which is also a qualitative cut and a structural loss. The kind of “standing for” Lacan intends here with the concept of repetition is certainly not something like an image or a faithful description. No, what Lacan wishes to stress is that this mark is situated at another level, at another place, it is “entstellt,” and as such, it is punctually impinging upon the bodily dynamics without rendering the event, without having an external meta-point of view, but cutting across registers according to a logics that is not the homeostatic memory logics. This paper elaborates on this distinction on the basis of a confrontation with what Freud says about the pleasure principle and its beyond in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and also takes inspiration from Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology. We argue that Lacan’s theory of enjoyment takes up and generalizes what Freud was after in Beyond the Pleasure Principle with the Wiederholungszwang, and pushes Freud’s thoughts to a more articulated point: to the point where a subject is considered to speak only when it has allowed the other, through discourse, to have impacted and cut into his bodily pleasure dynamics.

De l'homme (dé)raisonnable

Le secteur des soins subit de profonds remaniements en Europe et particulierement en Belgique ces dernieres annees. A la lumiere de cette ideologie du soin qui voit le psychisme comme objet a traiter avec la meme logique que le corps, nous proposerons quelques pistes de reflexions permettant de degager ce qui singularise radicalement le premier du second. Precisement, ce qui semble echapper radicalement a toute possibilite d’application de la logique medicale a la psychologie, se situe dans la temporalite des deux. Le corps se situe dans une logique cyclique et dans l’espace (topographique) la ou le psychisme se situe dans une logique historique ou les effets d’apres-coups sont fondamentaux et structurels.