When The Meaning Gets Lost In The Body: Psychosomatic disturbances as a failure of the transcendent function

In the present paper I would like to explore severe physical symptoms exhibited by patients at crucial stages of their analysis, which tend to occur when a ‘big change’ is foretold in dreams or following interpretative work aimed at providing the patient with insight into his major psychic conflict.

My hypothesis is that, in certain patients, when an interpretation manages to break through into a primitive deeply unconscious area, while the patient's ego struggles to gain psychological insight, the core of the personality offers extreme resistance to letting the infantile contents acquire a symbolic mental representation. In these patients, severe somatization occurs. The newly emerging insight appears to be too much for the patient's psyche to deal with.

The upsurge of affect reaches the threshold of the ‘zone of meaning’, appears to short-circuit it and to discharge itself into the body or into bodily organs. Thus, the body provides the last bulwark against integration.

These primitive unconscious affective contents which I have observed refer to early life-threatening experiences which were defended against by extreme splitting.

My hypothesis is that the primitive affects, brought about by certain experiences in infancy, were not attributed any psychic meaning by the mother. That is to say, the mother had not been able to process the excess of affective contents for her infant because she