[What is a "left"?].

OBJECTIVE

Patients with right hemisphere syndrome may be labeled as "gauche" by the rehabilitation staff. This term corresponds to a variety of oddities in behavior or discourse. The aim of this study is to understand the coherence of these oddities with the classical elements of right hemisphere syndrome.

MATERIAL: In this article, we present a detailed study of the discourse and the relation with others of a patient with severe left hemineglect, who was followed up for twelve months and did not exhibited any significant change in his symptomatology.

METHODS

This study relies on the data from neuropsychological examination, on notes written after rehabilitation session by the therapists and on data from weekly non-directive interviews.

RESULTS

This follow-up revealed disturbances of time sense, reduplication for places, misidentification of therapists, pseudo hallucinations, and showed that the transferential relation was "floating". The non-directive interviews permitted the patient to express his own interpretation of his troubles. He described them in terms of gaps in his body "carapace" and disorganization of the oral drive.

CONCLUSION

We propose to consider the symptomatology of this patient in relation with the subjective effects of the breaking up of his body image and the concomitant intrusion of the oral object (in the psychoanalytic sense of this term) in his psychic reality.