ABSTRACT
Fotis Bobos and Joerg Frommer both insist on the role of primary traumas in the pathogenesis of psychosomatic disorder. Trauma is defined as a too much of excitement and a not enough of symbolisation, which has a disorganising effect on the psychic and somatic apparatus. They state how actual life events can reactivate archaic traumas, and bodily symptoms could be an expression of this. Linking trauma with a failure in the primary encounter, both authors insist on the splitting process, illustrating how negative emotions generated by early traumas are contained in a split and maintained as active and alive. Some kind of a nameless dread, an unrepresentable fear of death, is embedded in the split, which marks a zone of fragility in the psychosomatic balance. The authors stress the importance of perception where the hypercathexis of sensory and perceptive aspects of external objects serve as a substitute for the deficient presence of the drive object in the inner world. Some interesting comments are made about the clinical cases, stressing both the necessity of taking into account the transference/countertransference processes, but also the great heterogeneity of psychosomatic patients and their often unbalanced oedipal organisation. The analyst is required to listen to psychosomatic patients with two eyes, at their various levels of functioning.
