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Hidden Affects in Somatic Disorders is a disappointing text in an area of keenly needed research. The issues that are raised, such as the role of affects, are poorly and inadequately developed. What I found most troublesome about the book are its outdated premise and references and its weak and inconsistent writing style.
This book addresses psychosomatic disorders from Freud's structural theory of psychoneuroses. That a book would continue this line of investigation in the light of decades of differing opinions and conclusions is troubling. Freud's theory asserted that psychosomatic disorders are due to repressed conflicts and their associated affects, and this neurobiological theory was employed by early psychosomatic researchers from the 1930s through the 1950s. When these theorists were unable to support the tenets of this hypothesis, interest in somatic disorders subsided. This approach overlooked the role that other factors, such as early object relations, loss, family pathology, and individual predispositions, play in somatic disease, all of which are considered by current investigators in the field but are ignored in Chiozza's book.