Acerca del Concepto de Curación

Abstract

This paper forwards the idea that “cure” is a process related to changes which occur in the patient as a consequence of analysis, during the period of treatment, and not: specifically, at its end. As to the validity or adequacy of using the word “cure” in psychoanalysis, the similarities and differences with the medical concept of cure are discussed. Although, just like in medicine, the aim is to diminish the patient’s suffering, the task of analysis is rather a larger knowledge of oneself and, as such, it comes close to the experience of learning. The access to a larger knowledge of one’s own unconscious allows a different relationship with oneself and with the world, increasing the capacity to enjoy and allowing for a larger development of the individual’s creativity. There is a difficulty however in specifying how this knowledge which has to do with the unconscious really is, and how it could be differentiated from the one stemming from a mere intellectual process. Perhaps we could come closer to this knowledge if we were to apply the idea of insight, or what Bion describes as “becoming what one is”. We have to keep in mind that it is a knowledge which comes about in an analytic situation, in transference, where being and experience are set in motion. It is thus that the intellectual and the affective side are intermingled, complementing each other essentially within the process of cure. In spite of the differences in the manner in which “cure” is focused upon theoretically, this paper underlines that there are points of view which are the same at the clinical level, approaches and coincidences which build a real area of intersection. We explain at the end the meaning of this “area of intersection” with Dora’s case history viewed from different theories (Freud, Klein and Lacan). The criteria which are shared as concerns the process of cure are related to the possibility that Dora might have approached her unconscious wishes and her limitations differently, which would have allowed her to move along a path where she could have taken up her womanhood by granting a new meaning to her history