In this article, the author examines bodily symptoms attributed to psychic mediating factors in the light of a psychoanalytic model of affect and symbolization. He uses clinical material from a consultation-liaison setting and a psychoanalytic treatment to illustrate how the model might help to understand different bodily symptoms as manifestations of different degrees of failure in the psychic elaboration of affect. On a more personal note, this could be seen as an attempt to understand, using a newly acquired conceptual tool, what went on in his 20 years of experience in the general hospital psychiatry setting.