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Volume 14, N°1, Year 2016/Latin American Psychoanalytic Federation FEPAL

Editorial

Habeas corpus

Mariano Horenstein

A few hundred feet from the Pyramid, I bent down, scooped up a handful of sand and then, a little farther away, let it silently spill. Under my breath I said: I am modifying the Sahara.
Jorge Luis Borges, 19851

Beyond its legal resonances, which link it to the attempt to preserve the rights to life, to freedom, and to be heard by the legal system, the Latin expression habeas corpus means something like, “You may have the body.” It seems self-evident, but perhaps it is not. It is obvious that the person who lies on a couch is placing his or her body there. Psychoanalysis emerged precisely because someone decided to hear what that body – the body of hysteria, to be more specific – had to say. Contrary to what we might think, while at times our presence would seem to be reduced to a voice outside the patient’s field of vision, psychoanalysts also have a body. We may find different types of psychoanalysts depending on how they relate to their patients’ bodies – from the precursor of the discipline, Charcot, who would touch patients’ hysterogenic zones to trigger cloned attacks, to contemporary analysts, who barely touch their patients’ bodies when they greet them.

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