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This issue of the Revue Française de Psychanalyse contains several articles on the new French approach to psychosomatic illness. French psychoanalysts who follow this approach emphasize that the field is no longer conceived as falling within the framework of physical medicine. This approach has involved jettisoning the earlier dualistic and a-psychoanalytic approach to psychosomatic illness, expounded by H. Flanders Dunbar and Franz Alexander in the United States, and by Sasha Nacht and Mustapha Ziwar in France.
Operational Functioning in Psychosomatic Practice. By , pp. 1367-1450.
The lead article, by Claude Smadja, is a finely worked-out, detailed, and well-documented discussion of the development of the French psychoanalytic treatment of psychosomatic illness. The theoretical background is traced, beginning with Freud and Freud's monism, leading eventually to a new approach in French psychoanalysis that the French now term “psychosomatics” (la Psychosomatique) and the illnesses they now term somatoses. Because Smadja's article provides an excellent introductory guide to several of the texts central to this new French approach to psychosomatics, I am limiting this abstract to a detailed discussion of his article.
Smadja's report presents a historical review of the stages of psychoanalytic theory dealing with physical illness, beginning with Freud and Freudian metapsychology. Smadja discusses the history and theoretical foundations of modern clinical psychosomatics. He argues for the positioning