The story hiding in the body. Basis for a psychosomatology

Abstract

The text begins by pointing out that the psychoanalytic discovery of an unconscious psyche helps us understand the evolution of cognitive processes that shape our image of the world and the ego. Since psychoanalysis began, in 1895, with the investigation of hysteria, it is possible to say that, along with psychoanalysis, a scientific, psychosomatological exploration of the psyche-soma relationship has been born. Psychoanalytic theory has been developed, since then, following a “physical” model, more geometric that culminated in the metapsychology that Freud introduced in 1915, and a historical, more linguistic model, which is implicit in the entire course of his work, although it could never consolidate in a fully established theoretical body. However, when, in 1938, he formulates the second fundamental hypothesis of psychoanalysis, he not only gives up, explicitly and definitively, the Cartesian dualism that leads to a dissociation between the mind and the body, but also lays the groundwork for a metapsychology of metahistoric kind. Then, the psychosomatic problem is explored not only as it appears in the context of a session that is part of a psychoanalytic treatment, but also in the circumstances of usual medical practice. In general, a method and the experience obtained with that procedure are described. We call it a pathobiographical study, and it has been practiced continuously in Buenos Aires since its beginning, in 1972.  During the past years, other institutions (in Rio Cuarto, Córdoba, in Montevideo, Rome, Florence, Perugia, and Bogotá) adopted that practice.