42

The social function of politeness is very widely acknowledged, but it has another, more subtle function. From the point of view of its moral and ideal aspects (as propounded by some 19th-century writers) and using a new clinical case, we will try to establish that politeness also enables the subjects to keep their distance from the Other, protecting themselves while coming into contact with it. This truly “subjective function” that we highlight fits in with what can be seen in the counterphobic setting. This answers, in adults, the “logic” of the phobic mechanism: the subject removes a “trait” from the phobic object (due to its phallic appeal), so that the latter becomes temporarily bearable. Politeness would then be a manifestation of the dread for the Other (intuited in the DSM under the label “social phobia”), and could be considered a paradigm of a “counterphobic answer” in the social dimension.