Oral-Digestive Superego Aggressions and Actual Conflicts in Peptic Ulcer Patients

In two articles published in this journal, after mentioning other theories, such as those of G. Draper, F. Alexander, R. W. Pickford, T. Szasz and G. F. Mahl, I developed my own theory about the genesis of peptic ulcers. Very concisely, it could be referred to as the theory of a bad internalized mother acting aggressively upon an individual in oral-digestive regression.1

This theory holds that when an individual is in partial oral-digestive regression because of the complications in his childhood instinctive evolution and happens to be living in a harmful environmental situation (a frequent example is love-dependence upon an aggressive person who does not satisfy sexually), then the internal aggressions of his representations of a bad internalized mother (maternal superego) against his ego and his id are intensified in him. Because of the oral-digestive regression in this individual, the aforementioned aggressions preferably take on unconscious oral-digestive aspects, such as sucking or biting ('re-morse', from 'mordere, mors'—to bite) the digestive tract. Besides, the representations of a bad internalized mother in his superego force this individual to the masochistic behaviour of provoking alimentary disorders and of ingesting indigestible or insufficient food. This food may harm him by itself or through the psychic cathexis he places upon it, or upon the alcohol or tobacco he consumes. All this, acting locally or through nervous and hormonal processes, may give rise in the stomach and duodenum to chlorhydropeptic hypersecretion, hyperperistalsis and muscular spasms, stasis and vascular spasms, a decrease in the efficiency of the gastro-duodenal mucous barrier, lack of certain amino-acids and antiacid hormones, and other organic disorders, that finally lead to peptic ulcer.

The intention of the present paper is to go deeper into the understanding of the oral-digestive internal aggressions of the representations of the bad internalized mother in ulcer-patients,