Bodies at risk

a supervisory experience with Christophe Dejours

Abstract

Workers who perform high-risk tasks develop their own psychic mechanisms to cope with the daily possibility of occupational accidents, with inuence their family relationships. What would be the consequences for the development of their children? Neusa is a 36-year-old single woman seeking care due to gastrointestinal symptoms that began on the day of her father’s funeral parlor. Despite living in the state capital, having a doctorate and playing an important role in her public employment, Neusa has few friends, lives alone and her routine is still closely linked to her family who remains in the country. Neusa’s case was taken for clinical supervision with Dr Christophe Dejours, who is psychiatrist, psychoanalyst at assistant at occupational medicine at Paris School of Medicine. He assumed that the traumatic factor triggering this patient’s psychosoma-tic symptoms was the death of her father, a risk worker. ese workers tend to suppress their fantasies and imaginative thinking in order to avoid accidents. eir children, in turn, can forgot their own fantasy world by identifying with their parents. is identi-cation can lead to the experience of not inhabiting one’s own body. For Dejours, we live simultaneously in two bodies: the biological body, which is the body of the organs and functions, the body that appears on the anatomy planks, the one we examine under the microscope or that we treat with antibiotic; and the erotic body, which is the lived body the one we “inhabit” through which we experience life, suffering, pleasure, sexual arousal, desire. e biological body is innate and it is from that the erotic body is built, which is of the order of the acquired.