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Joyce McDougall has been influenced by a group of colleagues within the Paris Psychoanalytic Society interested in psychosomatic patients called the psychosomaticiens, which includes Fain, Marty, David, de M'Uzan, Braunschweig, and Green. In France, many psychosomaticiens work in general
hospitals along with the medical team in the treatment of physical illness including cancer. It is unfortunate that much of their work has not been translated into English, so Theaters of the Body is a welcome contribution from French psychoanalysis to our understanding of psychosomatic patients.
In addition to drawing from the rich tradition of the psychosomaticiens, McDougall offers her own unique blending of theoretical perspectives. She uses Freud's theory of actual neuroses as a bridge to a fourth transformation of affect in which all memory of a painful emotion is totally destroyed or expelled from consciousness (disaffection) resulting in a state of psychic deprivation. In McDougall's view, the psychosomatic patient uses an archaic form of symbolism in which emotional messages bypass usual cognitive and language structures and are expressed directly by the body. Like the infant (from the Latin infans, “one who cannot speak”), the psychosomatic patient reacts to painful feelings like anger and separation anxiety with physical symptoms. Borrowing from Bion she sees words as containers of volatile emotional experience which can prevent their discharge through the soma. McDougall points out that although psychosomatic symptoms are often life threatening, they are also a primitive way to ensure psychic survival. With a kind of “archaic hysteria,” psychosomatic patients are often protecting their right to exist (as opposed to their right to sexual satisfaction as in hysteria). The difficult task of psychoanalysis is to translate the mysterious dramas played out in the theaters of the body into analyzable verbalizations. Although these views are similar to some of the ideas McDouga