Psychic Plasticity
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#01
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.86
5. > On Neural Plasticit y, Trauma , and the Loss of Affects > Freud and the Event
Theoretical move: The passage challenges Freud's exclusively positive concept of psychic plasticity—the imperishability and regressibility of all prior mental states—by confronting it with neurobiological evidence that brain lesions can produce irreversible destructions of psychic formations (dreaming, affect, identity), yielding a "purely destructive event" that cannot be integrated, remembered, or made into a moment of personal history.
Plastic means imperishable, resilient, possessing the ability to cure or to heal. The metaphor of the city of Rome shows that psychic space, thought in reference to architectural extension, is always capable of exhibiting its memory and overcoming wounds and loss.