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In hypochondria, the persecutory character acting on the subject’s body seems to us a kind of actualization, a demonic return, the primordial experience, which gives a new perspective on hypochondriac manifestations in which body anguish is one of the most archaic ways of living the experience of death. In hypochondria, it is projected onto the body surface.
Our purpose in this paper is to show that the bodily sensations caused by hypochondria perpetuate an archaic time whose history has been suspended. If time is frozen, suspended, nothing can succeed, there is a refusal of movement. Body overinvestment, in our opinion, is an attempt to freeze time. Therefore, the ego updates its most elemental and primitive mode of existence, protecting itself thus from the effects of traumatic experience.
Which is the memory singularity, however, in these cases, i.e., in which way experienced events may be stored on the mind and always re-experienced on the body without being connected to a past experience as a memory?
Trauma and body memory
In the “Letter 52” (1950/1996e) Freud informed Fliess that he was working in a thesis that memory does not present itself at once, unfolding at different times, for being made of rearrangements, retranscriptions. He proposed a scheme made of different registers, which would be separate according to the neurons, their vehicles. In this scheme, there is a first stage, perception, which does not preserve any trace of the lived experience. After this stage, we have the first record, and this belongs to memory: indexes of perception. The second record corresponds to the inscription of mnemonic traits of the unconscious, the memories. In the following record occurs the third transcription, pre-consciousness, related to verbal representations, corresponding to the ego.
Perception, the excitement in the perceptual system leaves marks: the first signs of perception. They are the first transcriptions and in this process the original is lost, little of perception and of the original event is kept. What is preserved as an impression is what will be transposed. The signs of perception are the first record of the excitatory process of perception, therefore being a part of the memory system. However, to become mnemonic traits, integrating the unconscious and therefore liable to memory, it will require another transcription