From the Pharmacy of Plato – the book of Jacques Derrida – the Greek philosopher’s admiration for the incipient hipocratical medicine of that times is traced by the author in the platonic texts. This medicine harmonized to Plato’s dialetic method in opposition to the narrowness of the sofist method that better suited the prehipocratical medicine of the charlatan healers.
The hipocratical pharmakon, with its primitive and still current properties of Drug, of Tincture, of Script and of Numinous Object, is reached. The current Drugstore, that came to usurp the traditional space occupied by the pharmacy, maintains the pharmakon as such. Due to the efforts of the massive propaganda, of the exorbitances of the scientific research and of the precariousness of most of the medical attendances of our times the pharmakon is not reduced to the inert category of a simple product.
There are, also in Psychofarmacology, many (pathoplastic) modifications generated by the contemporary mutilations suffered by the pharmakon. The Author emphazises that the antidepressive pharmakons favor the pulsional re-balance. In spite of the apparent improvement in the clinical picture, they may lead, in the melancholic, to a type of “postponement” of the destruction and of the triumph over the lost object. However, in this case, they don’t seem to have any influence in the self’s destructive sadistic force.
Psychopathology; psychiatry; psychopharmaco; pharmakon