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When the soldiers came home from the war 2500 years ago, Socrates said: “The body cannot be cured without the mind.”
Today about 40% of all army disabilities and about 60% of all illness encountered in the office of the general practitioner as well as of the specialist are of what is called “psychosomatic” origin. One group of patients present themselves at the doctor's office with physical complaints without showing evidence of physical disease. A second group show psychosomatic disturbances — that means physical symptoms caused by psychological conflicts, which can be prevented from developing into serious physical illness only by early psychological treatment. The patient's fear of cancer or tuberculosis may be his way of experiencing an unconscious conflict, the externalization of his feeling of inner disintegration. Or his sensation of bodily illness may have become an indispensable part of his personality without which he would feel unworthy, inexcusably below the mark he has set for himself.
Freud, in his paper on “The Psychological Mechanisms of Hysterical Phenomena,” proved that the unconscious is not simply a cemetery of the past, but a highly powerful, active force in our physical as well as in our psychic life. In his words: “In hysteria the unbearable idea is rendered innocuous by the quantity of excitation attached to it being transmuted into some bodily form of expression, a process for which I should like to propose the name conversion.” (1)
Freud called the hysterical conversion a “mysterious leap” from the psychic to the physiologic. (2) The conversion symptom was considered a symbolic substitute for an unbearable emotion and an equivalent of an unconscious emotional tension which was ultimately traced to sexual tension.
Ferenczi, following closely this original concept of Freud, went even so far as to state that a physical conversion symptom is always a kind of genitalization of that part of the body. (3)
This first systematic attempt to interpret phys