Form: a dualist thought, more aimed at maintaining internal coherence than at expressing observed facts, reveals a need for systematization.

Content: the idea of evolution, “fundamental language” common to many nineteenth century authors, enables extrapolation and, analogically, extension of the specific psychoanalytic principles out of the psychoanalytical field.

Theory: a diachronic model which, as M. Foucault powerfully outlined it, prevailed throughout the West in the nineteenth century (Foucault 1966), insists on the permanent interdependence with what has come before, considered as antecedent.

Hypochondria meets this obstacle to thought which is situated in history and results from history.

Dualism first, under the sterile form of the Actual/Neurotic pair, which shares with many others the grim privilege of giving a globalizing view of human and biological evolution, so that this view seems a projection of multiple clinical observations: Reality/Fantasy, Somatic/Psychical, Self preservation/Sexual. Let us name them “synthetic concepts,” by their single aim which seems close to the great explanatory myths which account for the totality of each phenomenon. They contrast with the more clinical, and perhaps analytical, concepts which, as transference, enable discovery and, through experience, remain in direct contact. Dualism is not, therefore, the essential problem. Even if it is an obstacle to research and discovery, it can also be particularly fruitful when it is a purely confrontational notion, basis of how psychical life works, and from which the solutions that are psychoneuroses develop. We should rather isolate two different uses which coexist in the Freudian system and which the different drive theories successively exemplify: if the former, which is anchored to clinical practice, fruitfully produced a model where conflict is predominant and even receives a corporeal foundation while remaining internal to the analytical field, the latter, on the contrary, is terribly sterilizing as it opposes life instincts to death instincts, thus producing a self-contained system which, on the clinical level, has no justification. A synthetic concept blocks all exits, intending to explain all and nothing at the same time: a self-confirming dogma can follow from it which, as an all-embracing vision, tells orthodoxy, focal point of coteries. The concept of actual is akin to this use: one can be for or against it, debate is not possible.

Evolutionism then, which, via analogy, that is via a reflection whose very purpose is to excuse from scientific work, enables to establish a structural isomorphism where actual is identified with simple, with inferior, with almost archaic. Projected on the level of world history and helped by a cyclical temporality, hypochondria becomes the “primordial primitive,” initial stage toward which one comes to regress and to which one sometimes even remains fixed: regression to the narcissistic phase, the one of early childhood which is reproduction of the narcissistic phase of all humanity. In plain language: the Actual neurotic is a version of the baby and of the caveman too! It is no use to insist on its rejection from the psychoanalytical field··· The “archaic illusion” is thus triumphant, formal similarity hiding the greatest heterogeneity. But, as well as for the uncanny, extrapolation seems to be the rule:

The double was originally an insurance against the extinction of the self···, and it seems likely that the “immortal” soul was the first double of the body. The invention of such doubling as a defense against annihilation that has a counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of expressing the idea of castration by duplicating or multiplying the genital symbol. In the civilization of Ancient Egypt, it became a spur to artists to form images of the dead in durable materials. But these ideas arose on the soil of boundless self-love, the primordial narcissism that dominates the mental life of both the child and primitive man and when this phase is surmounted, the meaning of the “double” changes: having been once an insurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death (Freud 1919).

Diachrony, finally, which is going beyond and preserving an “Actual” core in any psychoneurosis, thus defining a genealogy where evolutionism is unifying: in addition to the fact that simple precedes complex which is always propped on an inferior form, this method always isolates a causal chain which explains superior forms by elementary factors. Such a thought is thus hierarchic, as it goes from Somatic to Psychological posing Actual precedes Psychoneurotic; it conforms to Spencerian evolutionism which is only a sociobiological by-product of Darwinism deviated toward liberalism by the argument, shaped as a simulacrum, of a naturally highly nonegalitarian order (Tort 1983, pp.333–431). As a consequence, the diachronic model which asserts that either paranoia or paraphrenia derive, through a strict causality, from hypochondria, considered as little elaborated, is just a form of the ideology that prevailed in the early eighteenth century, in its attempt to define a genuinely scientific framework. The classical scientific Cartesian method which links the facts to be explained to their causes is then an alibi for an ideology that can be called para-scientific.