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I think this is something we have to consider in its context. What we now know is that the seat of consciousness is in the brain; the ancients, including the Epicureans, had other ideas. Some believed that the seat of the 'soul' was in the breast with the heart. It is easy to observe in oneself the quickening of the pulse in love or fear; more difficult, to intuit that this behavior is governed by signals from the nervous system.
The Epicureans thought that the 'soul'—call it what you will—consisted of a sort of skein of finer atoms spread throughout all the members. If a portion of this soul rests in the hand at any given point in time, and the soul's chief end is pleasure, perhaps the argument of Chrysippus makes a little more sense?
Of course the shift of the soul from the members or the breast to the brain simply shifts the problem. Does the brain feel the lack of the Supreme good? I think of the restlessness that Lucretius describes of the Roman nobility; in the city they wish they were in the country, and in the country they wish they were in the city.
One of Epicurus' achievements was to instruct us in how to tap new sources of pleasure—even something as simple as remembering past pleasures can be a constant source of genuine pleasure available to us whenever we need it.
At this moment I think I would try to link this to the discussion with Philia as an example of trying to "measure pleasure by reason" and coming to a "reasoned understanding of pleasure" in order to dig out why the illustration seems (again, to me) so unsatisfying.
Part of the problem may be that this is an argument from Chrysippus, who has a Stoic was an arch-proponent of logic over
feeling, trying to make a ham-handed logic-based point about pleasure (which he detests as a feeling that distracts from virtue).
It's probably a significant part of the issue that pleasure (as a feeling) can never really be captured by a "logic" argument.
And of course in discussing THAT issue, this from "Torquatus" shouldn't be far from our minds as a huge red flag about the attempt to bridge logic and feeling, as Epicurus himself apparently warned against it:
[31] There are however some of our own school, who want to state these principles with greater refinement, and who say that it is not enough to leave the question of good or evil to the decision of sense, but that thought and reasoning also enable us to understand both that pleasure in itself is matter for desire and that pain is in itself matter for aversion. So they say that there lies in our minds a kind of natural and inbred conception leading us to feel that the one thing is t for us to seek, the other to reject. Others again, with whom I agree, finding that many arguments are alleged by philosophers to prove that pleasure is not to be reckoned among things good nor pain among things evil, judge that we ought not to be too condent about our case, and think that we should lead proof and argue carefully and carry on the debate about pleasure and pain by using the most elaborate reasonings.
who say that it is not enough to leave the question of good or evil to the decision of sense
Others again, with whom I agree, finding that many arguments are alleged by philosophers to prove that pleasure is not to be reckoned among things good nor pain among things evil, judge that we ought not to be too condent about our case, and think that we should lead proof and argue carefully and carry on the debate about pleasure and pain by using the most elaborate reasonings.
I can almost see Epicurus gasping "OMG!!! " if he could know that some in his own school were arguing that. Though I doubt he would have restrained his response to an expression of exasperation. Someone(s) would have had a lot of explaining to do to Epicurus as to how they managed to fall so far from the prototype. For anyone who didn't get the message after he explained it to them in person, we'd probably have some good texts on excommunication if he could have lived to write about that kind of thing. 
Unfortunately this section of DeWitt does not seek to explain the "witticism" -- but does include some gratifying slams at Chrysippus and ultimately labels logicians like him as "intellectual eunuchs" 
Maybe we can find some articles discussing this, because the statue or something like still exists, correct?
