[Illness symptoms and narcissistic object relations in patients with ulcerative colitis]

We have taken the results from a comparison between 47 patients with ulcerative colitis and so-called "healthy" controls using a semantic differential and the "Freiburger Beschwerdeliste" to investigate the relationship between loss of the narcissistic object and physical complaints. The colitis-patients differ significantly from the controls in virtually all of their complaints, which prove to be independent of the duration of illness. The patients feel themselves more alienated from their "key figure", their narcistic objects. This alienation is correlated positively to the severity of their various complaints. Ailments of the alimentary chanal are an exception: here we only find such a correlation for patients whose illness lasted less than 3 years. We presume that ulcerative colitis may be initiated by a loss of the "key figure", but that physical processes may then determine the further course of the illness.