Freud asked whether brain damage retains any narrativity once dissociated from fantasy.

Evidence

These considerations bring us to the fundamental question that Freud addresses retroactively to contemporary neurology. The source of narrativity, which is necessary for the presentation of pathological cases, lies in the fictioning power of illness itself. But if illness is stripped of such power, is it still possible, without the mediation of a fantasmatic work, to make it speak? — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded, 2102

Categorization

• QUESTION: The central open question of the book: can a lesion ‘speak’ without fantasmatic mediation? Malabou’s affirmative answer is the spine of the argument.
• SEED: Essay angle: the ethics of letting neurological damage speak without forcing it into narrative — a direct challenge to narrative medicine’s assumptions.
• XREF: connects to: Freud’s libido theory absorbs even organic brain damage into sexual etiology — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 2446; Freud’s model renders brain-lesion disaffection a self-destruction, not a neural cause — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 2461