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Débats en psychanalyse has dedicated an issue, edited by Félicie Nayrou and Gérard Szwec, to a specific theoretico-clinical field: the psychoanalytic psychosomatics that emerged with the Paris School of Psychosomatics in the 1950s and 1960s. As Szwec emphasises in his
introduction, although the links between the psyche and the soma have been explored by Freud and his successors (in particular Ferenczi and Groddeck), the psychosomatics of the Paris School has considered the psychic functioning of somatic patients from a new angle that the various articles in this volume help to illuminate from their contemporary perspective.
Historically, the psychosomatics of the Paris School was created by psychoanalysts who were members of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, principally: Pierre Marty, Michel Fain, Michel de M'Uzan and Christian David. Based on their analytic training rooted in Freudian metapsychology, the first generation of psychosomaticians took an interest in somatic illness and some of them worked in that capacity in medical services. This is attested by the historical texts at the end of the book, consisting of interventions by Marty, Fain and de M'Uzan at a surgery conference in 1959, which report their work in their psychosomatics service in a general surgery department.
The interest in somatic illness nevertheless led psychosomaticians to suggest a very different clinical theorisation from the nosological frameworks of medicine because they highlighted the patients’ psychic functioning rather than the illness from which they were suffering. Moreover, they rejected the possibility of using the model of neurosis that considers symptoms in terms of their unconscious meaning. As a result, they carried out a reversal of perspective in relation to the “psychosomatic medicine” of Franz Alexander (Chicago School) which, being based on the model of the hysterical conversion, sought to demonstrate a causal action between psychological factors and physiological proc