[The injured patient and the psyche].

This paper aims at presenting a theoretical approach of actual work done for many years with patients awaking from coma. Its general methodology comes from Peircean semiotics and reveals a deep split between a "tone" and a "type". Some of the epistemological conditions that found the treatment of singular cases are here explored. Then a model is built inspired by the Lacan's "phase of mirror", that reveals the way the team refers to the "semiotic recovery" phase.