You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Maurice Nadelman (1990) noted that Freud's article “Psychical Treatment” (1894) could be seen as the basis for modern psychosomatic treatment.1 In that paper, Freud indeed lays a basis for a psychosomatic treatment of some physiological ills. However, the relation soma-mind or mind-soma seemed to divide the therapists and the research in later years: in some quarters, a focus on the somatic explanation even for psychic ailments; in others, a disregard of the somatic components of psychic disturbances.
One of the notable exceptions to this divide has been the Paris Psychosomatic School, which has sought to keep the complementary view alive. This began with Pierre Marty, who, together with Michel de M’Uzan, developed the idea of “mechanical thinking” whereby normal psychological defences and structures break down and so lead to somatization. Stora, Marilia Aisenstein, and Claude Smadja introduced the “second generation” where the ideas of Green and Winnicott are leading to a further development of the ideas of the “first generation.” Since 2000, Stora, an exponent of this second generation, has been the founder/leader of the French Group of Psychoanalysis, Medicine and Neuroscience, a regional group of the NPSA, and has sought to integrate neuropsychoanalysis in what he calls “neuropsychosomatics” (Dodds, 2008). France is by no means the only country where psychosomatics plays a role in health services although it is often not so closely related to psychoanalysis as in the Paris School. For example, in the USA or Germany, we see consultation-liaison psychiatry, which seems to resemble the role of psychosomatics that Stora describes (Diefenbacher, 2004; Levenson, 2019).
Stora is a psychosomatist. He interviews the patients, referred to him by the medical staff, to get a picture of the whole patient: his life, his history. He thus explores the relationship between psychic functioning and somatic disorders, not because the mind is the cause of the somatic disorder, but bec