The paper discusses the thought model where psychosomatic disturbances are presumed to emerge through the acting subject’s diverse goals and their sub-goals. People are born with the skills required for their life effort. This works in normal situations related to the environment and the self, but calls for changes in anomalous circumstances. People then have at their disposal a plasticity in their competence, that is, they learn and fumble for new goals and functions. Plasticity is a help in the subject’s life effort, but it often leads to harmful changes, too, in the functions and structures of the subject’s psychophysical system, in other words, to psychosomatic symptoms. When people experience that their competence is inadequate and find it laborious to learn new goals and functions, they may resort to psychosomatic symptoms and sadomasochism and fix them into permanent forms of acting. Psychoanalysis can help people free themselves from these forms of activity by helping them to make them conscious and through that, turn them into the possibility of choosing other alternatives.