MEDICAL DISCOURSE, SCIENCE, THE TALKING C URE

As early as the beginning of the XIXth C, Francois Magendie who greatl y influenced Claude Bernard advocated the subversion of the Hippocrati c tradition by medical discourse, This transfer of medicine has allowe d prodigious progress in physiological and now biological field the pa sses by an objectivation of the symptom and a reduction of the suspend ed words of the subject to a mere clinical sign. Psychoanalytic discou rse has been constituted by obeying the same scientific requirements: this starting from the experience of hypnosis of which Freud issued af ter having remarked on the ''mystical'' element it included. The ''tal king cure'' underlines the unconscious symbolic value - subjective and polysemic - of language, its hold over the subject and the body; it o pens an area of transference in which the subject may emerge through h is speech and transform his relationship to pain into words. The prese nt form of activity of Magendie's programme calls for a new correlatio n of these two forms of discourse, these two ways of perceiving and li nking the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. [T,N.: The ''Real'' he re is used in J, Lacan's sense, meaning that point of honor that canno t be symbolised].