Aphasia and the Right Side

Paper presented by Mme Petit, of the Audio-Psycho-Phonology Department of the Centre hospitalier intercommunal of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges (Val-de-Marne), at the 3rd International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology held in Antwerp in 1973.

Aphasia and the Right Side

Paper by Madame Petit
Audio-Psycho-Phonology Department — Centre hospitalier intercommunal, Villeneuve-Saint-Georges (Val-de-Marne)

Why take an interest in aphasia, you may ask?

For several reasons. The first, because it is partly thanks to it that we are gathered for this Congress; indeed, as we shall see, the research that led to the discovery of the Language Centre had aphasia as its starting point and as its field of observation.

The second is that the aphasic patient presents certain analogies with the children we usually care for; thus, he is likely to help us better understand our young patients.

The third is that we should perhaps reconsider the etiology of this apparently essentially organic disease and relate it to the whole symbolism of language.

First of all, what is aphasia? Aphasia is a startling disease, in the sense that it occurs suddenly and produces a regression that is at once physical, linguistic and psychological. It causes a physical regression, since we know that aphasia is often associated with hemiplegia, the patient suddenly finding himself unable to walk or to make a gesture.

The linguistic regression highlights the fact that the patient will find himself unable to speak normally, except to say “yes” or “no” or scraps of incomprehensible words, with all the more difficulty since a buccofacial paralysis is often noted.

We can already gauge all the consequences this will have on his dependence vis-à-vis those around him: the aphasic will find himself in the same situation as an “infant” in the etymological sense of the term — not speaking, everything must be done for him.

This disease does not occur particularly in very elderly people, but in people often in full activity, around fifty years old, and this will be all the more distressing, as one can guess, for a man who, from one day to the next, will lose the use of his limbs, of speech and, consequently, his profession, all his activities, thus reduced to a state of total powerlessness.

Let us briefly recall the evolution of the discoveries on aphasia.

[Editorial note — The available facsimile is incomplete: pages 2 to 4 of the original document are missing (blank sheets in the digitization). The intermediate development — the history of discoveries on aphasia and the first observations — is therefore absent, and the transcription resumes directly at the last preserved page.]

The Right Side, the Father, Language

Indeed, if the case history is pushed a little further, one realizes that even our aphasics who currently have balanced family relationships have not completely resolved their problems with the Father, that is to say symbolically with the Right Side, with Language.

Thus Mr D., abandoned by his parents at the age of 6 months, was raised by his aunt; it was only a few weeks after her death that the aphasia was triggered. Mr R., the “infant” we spoke of a few moments ago, was a butcher by trade and he worked the markets in the company, of course, of his dear 83-year-old mother! It was at the moment when he was having a shop built that he would have run all by himself that the aphasia occurred and all his plans collapsed, just when he was beginning to free himself from the maternal grip and to become autonomous.

Some authors have ventured down a psychoanalytic path to try to explain aphasia and have examined, for example, the relationships of phonemes with the drives. Thus the “L”, prefigured in the act of sucking, and the “R”, in the grasping of the desired object, would be the first to be impaired during a motor aphasia.

Without going so far as to give the various phonemes a psychoanalytic meaning, it is certain, since Freud, that language has a relationship with the unconscious; the forgetting of certain words is thus not fortuitous but has a meaning. Since we know that language, the Word, symbolizes the encounter with the Father, the Right Side, becoming aphasic through paralysis of the right side will signify the refusal of this Word, the refusal of the Father.

By pushing the case history of our female hemiplegic, Mme M., further, one realizes that she had a very unhappy childhood, that her father left the home very early and that, her mother having remarried, she had found herself alone with a younger sister; then she herself married very young, to a man who beat her… When Mme M. is asked her name, she can only say her maiden name, that is to say that of the Father…

“Ask your hand what its name is,” she is told, while pointing to her right hand. She answers with “the name of the Father”… “When you look at your right hand, what does it make you think of?” she is asked. “Well, my goodness,” she tells us, “it has gone away… The father, yes, first of all; the husband, perhaps; daddy has gone… it is not the same thing as the hand…” When she is shown one of her photos, she asserts: “that is my mother” (by oedipal identification); and if she is shown photos of her second husband: “that is daddy… my father.” It is only in the course of treatment that she will manage to say “my husband.”

Mr D., abandoned by his parents, raised by his aunt, can say the names of his 5 nephews without error, but the aunt’s name seems struck by a very selective amnesia. He has himself called “Charles” like his father, whereas his real name is “Auguste”; when asked to look at his right hand, he refuses: there is something like a resistance to looking at his whole right side.

If certain organic symptoms develop in a determined psychic context (otitis, for example, expressing the refusal to hear), perhaps we must admit aphasia within the lineage of psychosomatic disorders?

Source: Mme Petit, “Aphasia and the Right Side,” paper at the 3rd International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology, Antwerp, 1973. Transcription from the facsimile.