Of a possible alienation of the (real) body in favour of the unary stroke.

SZMIDT Sylvia


Inaugurated the new millennium raids in the world the news that the genetic map would have been deciphered almost on its whole, with the projection that the science could operate correcting fails in the nucleotides sequence, considering that that disorder would have as a consequence the alteration of the specific function of that gene. That is to say that a defective composition would determine the non or wrong fabrication of the protein codified by it.

We know likewise that cells own an intrinsical mechanism named Apoptosis that is a cellular programmed death produced by interior causes. These genes are distributed in the somatic cells of the multicellular organisms, it has been discovered that there is a gene that accredits the death (ICE), and one that inhibits it (BCL2).

Cancer would be a consequence of this mechanism’s fail, giving place to the reproduction and survival of the injurious cells for the organism.

As follows I will relate part of two clinic cases that are connected with cancer and haven’t stopped questioning me. The first one is about a fifty-six years old patient, Betty, that consults for me to authorize her third breast implantation (is important for this case to bring out that the word "breast" in Spanish is "mama", the homonym of "mother", in Spanish "mamá") after two rejections, because her doctor requires it to make the surgery, a psicologic safe-conduct as a condition for its realization. Some years ago the patient takes care of her sick mother with jealousy, who suffers generalized metastasis after the extirpation of the breasts she had experienced some years ago.

At a terminal moment of this convalescence, being attracted by a different snore Betty gets nearer to her mother, whom she describes as sublime and pronounces:-"Mom it’s me, Chiquita". She relates that her mother answers to these words with a sigh that was her last breath, I want to make conspicuous that the patient describes this scene with sweetness, with an ethereal tone as if her mother had expired that breath in an atemporal moment of appeasing inebriation.

"(Betty’s over-name in the bosom of the family is Chiquita)"

Betty’s peace is promptly disturbed under the suspicion that her dysplasia could become a cancer if her breasts were not amputated, in her long clinical peregrinations she manages to persuade a surgeon to practise the desired extirpation with the consequent implantation of artificial breasts. Frustrated these for rejection, some time after the patient starts a lawsuit against the entity that provides the over-put breasts bringing up in argument that the rejection was a consequence of a size disarrangement, there was according to the patient a disagreement between the implants (over-name) and her space to hold them, she said:-"…they were too big…".

Undoubtedly this identification to the other did not find place of subject enough to lodge any name.

Betty will keep trying, she has in the neighbourhood of her community the roll of the good Samaritan to whom they apply when any member requires hospitalization, intensive cares. She says:-"… a sick person needs attention until the last consequences…", securely Betty supposes that in that moment of biologic interruption could happen the beginning of a place that would allow her to number herself, but that doesn’t happen with a fellow man’s death. Anyway, Betty knows about the inauguration of a subject by the significant and the exile to a not to be for the impossibility of signifying herself, this passage is what our patient acts in an exemplary way.

Other patient with whom I maintain some interviews was derived by the gynaecology service because she used to consult compulsively in order to have her uterus extirpated because she had the presentiment of it developing a cancer, in her words:-"…if they empty me that’s it, I can stay calm…".

She relates they had practised a partial resection of her uterus neck for a non treated HPV, because of a lack of warning about the necessity of a treatment right when she consults because she can’t be mother. In that occasion they affirm her that she can be mother in any moment, when I try to situate in the time this facts she says that her son is five years and a half old and the partial resection was four years ago.

She relates that her mother had lost six pregnancies previous to her birth. When I ask her to tell me about her she can’t do it affirming that all the good and bad things she has are from her father, I insist over the particular and she describes her briefly, almost still and blind, put away in the kitchen, victim of diabetes, almost like a human spoil. Everything that she isn’t. Meanwhile his son, who at the moment attends to a double duty school, diagnosed and on medication for hiperquinesis, spends almost the entire day at school and during the nights at his home he suffers insomnia and she keeps his company trying to calm him down, trying to be a mother.

It’s imperative to rescue of these presentations that both patients talk about being mothers, namings. And immediately they develop the idea that they require an emptying.

Lacan says in the four concepts seminary, the Other is the place where the significant chain is placed, is that living being place where the subject has to appear. The emergence of a subject to its own being by the significant via is inaugurated with a lack, the significant is in the Other’s place first.

If every sign represents something for somebody the significant represents a subject for other significant, the first, emerges in the Other’s place (alienation), the second has an effect, the afanisis, that is to say the division of the subject. Through this separation, the subject finds the weak point of its primitive couple, of the significant´s articulation since it is essentially alienating. In the interval between these two significants the desire that is offered to the localization of the subject in the Other’s discourse experience is lodged.

Can cancer be thought as the letter instance in the body’s place in the procurement of space for the subject’s lodge?