The “Peri-Psychotic” in the Intersticial Clinics of Somatopsychical Excitation and Inhibition

Focused around the concepts of “peri-psychotic configuration” and “somatopsychical handicap”, this paper illustrates the clinics of (mental) excitation, and the avatars of repression, whether they be “in excess”, and thus situated on the side of the drive as it brims over, or whether they be “lacking”, and thus to be put on the side of conflictive extinction. Looking at a clinical vignette from an adapted psychoanalytic treatment, I shall tackle the defensive function, in this particular case a shield against excitation that is capable of slipping on the psychical handicap and its variations each time it is a matter of embodying and sealing off, in the transferential and countertransferential movements, the resurgence of primal traumas in the psychopathologies of inhibition, and the failing of inhibition that may be called, figuratively speaking, the clinics of abnegation.