Catherine Malabou — The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage

87 published claims from this book.

• A clumsy first encounter can permanently desensitize a woman
• A globalized psychic pathology is identical across all contexts.
• A Tourette’s patient cycled weekly between drug-mediated and disorder selves
• Affective deficits from brain damage cause social and work exclusion
• Alzheimer’s patients return to a generic, unowned childhood rather than their own
• Alzheimer’s produces a new identity rather than merely diminishing a person.
• An event becomes a symptom only when external accident translates into lived experience
• Anosognosia is the inability to recognize one’s own illness
• Anosognosic self-denial is organic, not psychological in origin
• Binding is both a psychical defense and a political mechanism against dissolution
• Brain injury cannot be fantasized or represented.
• Cerebral localization of the symbolic is a position worth defending, not dismissing
• Cerebral trauma victims need a mode of speech outside psychoanalytic interpretation
• Cerebral trauma victims need recognition that bypasses psychic translation
• Cerebral trauma’s identity metamorphosis must not reduce to any Freudian libidinal cause.
• Derrida’s geopolitics of cruelty ignores the psychic change it entails
• Destruction provides the only proof that cerebral auto-affection exists
• Destructive plasticity creates new identity precisely through annihilation of the old
• Destructive plasticity forms identity through deconstitution, not preservation
• Fear of death is immanent to sexuality through shared separation
• Fear of death is the ego relinquishing its narcissistic cathexis
• For Lacan the real only becomes graspable through symbolic inscription.
• Freedom of pleasures independent of sexual development stripped sexuality’s explanatory power.
• Freud asked whether brain damage retains any narrativity once dissociated from fantasy.
• Freud defined plasticity as libidinal mobility plus psychic indestructibility
• Freud distinguishes tendency from function to resolve whether binding precedes the pleasure principle
• Freud held psychic life autonomous from cerebral causes
• Freud held that the patient is fixated to his trauma
• Freud made sexuality the exclusive legal cause of all neuroses.
• Freud never found the death drive’s form because he stripped destruction of plasticity
• Freud reduces external trauma to a trigger of preexisting internal conflict
• Freud’s cathetic inertia in some patients correlates with psychic elasticity in psychoanalysis
• Freud’s ego can let itself die both from external danger and from superego persecution
• Freud’s evolutions all subordinate the aleatory event to the causal principle of sexuality
• Freud’s libido theory absorbs even organic brain damage into sexual etiology
• Freud’s life and death drives are fused rather than mutually exclusive
• Freud’s model renders brain-lesion disaffection a self-destruction, not a neural cause
• Globalized trauma mirrors brain damage as transformation without sublation
• Joining psychoanalysis and neurology remains an unfinished project
• Lacan’s Thing smuggles the Real back into representation, restoring lack
• Lesions hitting emotion-producing brain mechanisms alter identity
• Malabou frames her project as comparing childhood sexual accidents with war neurosis
• Mental illness is defined as the revival of the primitive
• Narrative repair of wounds mirrors neural repair and sustains it.
• Neurological case histories challenge the Freudian definition of psychic plasticity.
• Neurological suffering poses the question of the psyche surviving its own annihilation
• Neurological trauma can create an identity without origin or memory
• Neurology observes identity change from lesions without theorizing it
• Neurology offers a novel concept of the event free of accident and damage
• Neuropsychoanalysis is a working discipline rather than a settled science
• Organic and political traumas blur because both are blows against meaning
• Organic pain redirects libidinal interest away from loved objects
• Pathology can be identity-forming through superabundance of disease.
• Personality change is a full disruption of identity
• Profoundly amnesic patients can still feel love for specific family members
• Psychoanalysis and neurology can only dialogue after accepting negative plasticity
• Psychoanalysis begins with events usually dismissed as accidental
• Psychoanalysis developed as a theory of conflict near the war front.
• Psychoanalysis disputes distract from its core epistemic value
• Psychoanalysis is only a temporary phase awaiting neurological confirmation
• Pure traumatic neurosis involves ego withdrawal without any sexual-drive conflict.
• Real danger precedes and grounds instinctual danger for Freud
• Repetition acts as the psyche’s default emergency homeostasis when pleasure alone cannot manage trauma
• Resilience forms a subject between biology and social context
• Resilience marks irreversible psychic change, not a return to prior equilibrium
• Resilience means regaining stability after disaster, not mere robustness
• Sexual etiology of neurosis also implicates a drive toward pure negation.
• Specific brain lesions produce predictable, shared transformations of identity
• Survivors of trauma feel that suffering is not depression and return to life hurts.
• The cerebral self constitutes mortality internally without achieving self-knowledge
• The cerebral unconscious differs fundamentally from the Freudian ego or agency
• The drive necessitated a psychic space distinct from and replacing the nervous system
• The pleasure principle is itself affectless and unreflexive, so pleasure is not an emotion
• The primitive psychic form, not later developments, is imperishable
• The psychic apparatus is another inside made external to the nervous system
• The psychoanalytic encounter with the real is an appointment that always misses
• The sheer volume of trauma erases event intention and interpretation.
• The unconscious itself is exposed to irreversible destruction
• Trauma etymologically means a piercing that breaks a protective barrier
• Trauma loses its external character once folded into psychic meaning-making
• Trauma manifests in four symptoms unified by the concept of suddenness
• Trauma overwhelms the protective shield before homeostasis can respond.
• Trauma wounds are temporal ruptures born of the nullified past
• Traumatic neurosis is the ego’s flight from a psychic, not an external, threat
• Traumatic repetition seeks binding, not pleasure, contradicting dream theory.
• Treating shell-shocked soldiers near the front speeds their recovery
• Wakefulness can persist without consciousness, and Beckett’s theater stages precisely this state.