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Debray reviews the development of Freud's thought on somatic illness. Freud made a distinction between hysterical conversion and the opacity of somatic illness, which was devoid of "meaning" in his sense. However, some, including Groddeck and Garma, found that somatic illness improved through psychotherapy, and so made a premature and unfounded leap to include somatic illness within the framework of mental symptoms that could be treated in the same manner as conversion hysteria. The contemporary French school has, in contrast, been influenced by Freud's theory of the actual neuroses, and by the notion of stress as it appears in the work of Franz Alexander, who recognized "specific patterns of conflict." This work was continued by Flanders Dunbar, who investigated the typical psychological profiles of individuals presenting with the same illness. Sometimes this has become falsely reductive, as in the notion of "Type A personalities." Such studies lose the psychoanalytic perspective but still afford doctors some false sense of predictability and epidemiology. The notion of stress cuts across all this research, and can include