Gueniche, Karinne

The graft recipient and the graft, a necessary double strangeness? - 2018.


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An organ transplant imposes on the patient an unusual reorganisation of identity and a psychic work of translation/symbolisation in a context where passivity and even passivation are intermingled. For the recipient, it is a matter of letting him/herself be penetrated by the other (and his/her effects) who has entered the interiority of the body, and of letting him/herself be modified by the encounter with this object. The passive-­feminine position and the work of the feminine are thus at the heart of this extreme therapeutic procedure, but the outcomes are not known in advance. Among them is the rejection of femininity in the sense that the feminine psychic position of “being penetrated” is unbearable; this rejection implies the impossibility of facing up to the loss of an object, the narcissistic cathexis of which is commensurate with the risk perceived.