MEASURING AND SAYING THE BREATH - PLACE A ND ETHICAL FUNCTION OF A PSYCHOPATHOLOGICAL INTERVIEW IN A MEDICAL UNIT

On the occasion of a respiratory function exploration, it was given to the patient the possibility of evoking, in respect of freely associat ion, the psychical sense assumed by his symptom in his history. The un ity of time, place and methodology, clinical psychopathology, defined our ''experimental device''. When the patient of this study, with SAS, said to the physician ''I forget myself' with regard to ther apneas, the symptom, spoken, refered to a construction, ''complementary'' (Boh r, 1927) to another one described and objectivated by medicine. Each i nterpretation of the somatic phenomenon is reliated to the occurence o f speaking in the context of discursive associations and transference coordinates. The symptom is related to psychical reality, conflicts an d desire of the patient. By the relations established between the adve nt of the spoken symptom and other events, the patient considers it as a response to a personal question. Then, he can reach a fragment of h is verity, hear himself and hear the effects of his speaking. Without this possibility of reappropriating subjectively and intersubjectively the suffering in its irreducible singularity, he would remain alienat ed from his suffering, as to a trauma. Our approach gives evidence of the methodological as well as praxeological revision of the psychopath ology contribution to the medicine.