title: Reflections on coma: man deprived of his consciousness.
abstract: In this paper the authors reflect on the phenomena produced by the surprising communication between the unconscious of a therapist and that of a comatose patient. In a particularly disturbing context, when the patient's sternum is open and exposed, the therapist communicates empathically with the comatose person, identifying the patient's inexpressible experience and generating signs of a response from him in the form of the blinking of his eyelids. The absence of any reaction to pain, a pathognomonic sign of the comatose condition, could be related to the splitting-off of the trauma, as if the situation were frozen, through a denial of the sensory and neurological perception of pain - a kind of self-anaesthesia as a defence against the catastrophic anxieties raised by the threat of the return of the primary trauma. Starting from this encounter a relationship is formed whose guiding thread emerges in the shared illusion of a regression that makes it possible. It involves a process of returning to the past and a re-actualization of the past that includes the question of its change through representation.
authors.affiliation: 14 rue Albert-Gos, 1206 Geneva, Switzerland. xdalakaki@bluemail.ch
authors.forename: Xanthoula
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Dalakaki
authors.forename: Gregory
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Mantzouranis
mesh_terms: D003128:Coma / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D003142:Communication; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology; D001026:Coronary Artery Bypass / Q000523:psychology; D003422:Critical Care / Q000523:psychology; D004532:Ego; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation