Using as a starting point the growing generalization in the use of psychotropic substances, the author proposes to ponder about psychic treatment by chemical means. He then supposes the existence of a psychotropism which would eliminate that which from the psychic realm produces symptoms as a healing attempt.
Given these conditions and as a consequence of this supposition, it would be no longer necessary to talk about symptoms not only because of the asymptomatization of psychic life, but also due to a decreasing need of envisionining a “sujective demand” —transferencial— which could lead to the work required for the rearrangement of representations and affects.
While psychofarmacology was quite solidarious to a certain psychopathology, neurofarmacology considered itself as being more scientific, to the point of emancipating itself from any knowledge regarding individual psychopathological disfunctions; becoming thus no longer necessary to regulate itself through a clinic involved with processes.
What would then happen to psychiatric semiology and the nosographical spirit? What would happen to psychopathology? And in the final analysis, what would become of psycho-analysis until then somehow protected by psychiatry?
That which is then sought is, above all, to elucidate the enigmatic “psychic treatment by psychic means” and determine the conditions by which words —like a pharmakon— allow or not the means to interiorize medicating activities.