Between castration and the suture: Pascal’s bet in the construction of the clinical case

Abstract

We will present in this work the report of a clinical case articulated with the notion of bet. Pascal chose this term as an argumentative pillar of his propositions about the existence of God. The premise is that the subject cannot dodge the choice of divine existence, so the bet becomes imperative. In this way something is
necessarily lost, since in every game something needs to be bet and it is precisely this — which is bet — what is lost. The case will be that of a patient whose child was born with a genital malformation, having the female and male sex organs. The child was about to undergo a definitive surgery in which one of the sex organs would be castrated, in the real. The decision about the surgery would have to be taken by this mother, who hesitated, and during the analytical process operated a few turns in her discursive position that changed the destiny of the child. We will turn to the elaborations contained in Seminar 16 — in which Lacan takes up Pascal’s bet in order to advance upon the formalization of the inconsistency in the field of the Other — and from them we seek to extract clinical consequences.