[Psychological responses to the disease state and suffering]

Although, strictly speaking, they are not psychosomatic diseases, psychologic reactions to illness are both very common and often closely related to the psychopathological setting in which genuine somatizations occur. Thus, after a review of the possible meanings of the disease and its occurrence in the patient's life history and experience, the problem of reciprocal causal relationships between moral and psychologic distress, mental distress and objectivation of a disease is considered. From this discussion an opening towards slightly different theorizations on the psyche and soma, such as those which oriental medicines have always transmitted, is proposed.