Psychosomatics: a current overview

The term 'psychosomatic' has typically defined a series of illnesses in which somatic injury breaks out from psychic conflict not recognized as such. Currently, health is considered the only psychosomatic state of integration of mind and soma: an ideal state of integration. Somatic pathology is an effect of mind/body splitting. In the heterogeneous 'field of psychosomatics' interaction between psyche and soma ranges from classical psychosomatic illness to sporadic episodes in which the body has responded to an inability to process mental conflict. The author briefly reviews the development of psychoanalytic thought on psychosomatics in Argentina. He suggests the need to find appropriate conceptual tools to approach the mental structure underlying this pathology. He presents his ideas about the mental functioning of patients with somatization disorders. He introduces the concept of somatic event as a restitution phenomenon through which the subject attempts to re-establish self-integration and links with reality. He also offers some reflections on temporality and on changes in psychoanalytic technique with these patients. A clinical case illustrates his ideas.