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Toward the end of the 19th century, students of human behavior, led by French psychiatrists such as Charcot and Bernheim, rediscovered that the Cartesian boundary between body and mind is far from being impermeable. As their disciple, Sigmund Freud, was later to put the matter, certain ideas tend, in specific contexts, to make a “mysterious leap” from mind to body. It is widely understood that psychoanalysis developed in a medical (and in particular a neurological) setting because the initial target of Freud's investigations (see Breuer and Freud, 1895) was hysteria, which was then viewed as a somatic syndrome. In Studies on Hysteria, Breuer reported his great discovery of 1881 that hysterical symptoms could be influenced through a “talking cure,” a finding that compelled the logical conclusion that such somatic symptoms represent a “conversion” of mental processes to the bodily realm.
As Freud's clinical procedures gradually evolved into the psychoanalytic method, it soon became evident that somatization can be observed in statu nascendi in the psychoanalytic setting itself. Ferenczi (1912) was the first to enunciate the concept that such temporary symptoms in the course of analysis amount to communications from patient to analyst; as he put this, the symptoms may “join in the conversation.” Incidentally, the waxing and waning of such symptoms