PINTO, Tereza. Possible relations between psychotic episode and cochlear implants: reflections from the clinical context in france. []. , 25, 2, pp.33-51. ISSN 0103-5665.

This article is the result of the author's experience in the "Deafness Pool" (Pôle Surdité) of the Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne (Paris, France), mental health service hospital that offers psychiatric counseling for deaf adults. Some of those patients, without previous psychiatric history, arrive at the Pool featuring psychotic episode, which appears after an implantation of a cochlear implant. This point interrogates the relationship between the implant and the onset of psychosis. The author discusses the hypothesis that the medical idealization of healing hearing loss doesn't often consider that deafness itself may represent the basis for a stabilized identity for a subject whose psychic structure would be psychotic. In this case, the cochlear implant, taking the subject off of his own universe and the deaf culture, could become the factor that induces the onset of his psychosis by destabilizing his supplementation ego.

: psychosis; deafness; supplementation; cochlear implant; psychoanalysis.

        · | |     · |     · ( pdf )