ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how intimately entwined faulty superego development can be in psychosomatic patients, both with their symbolic difficulties and with the maintenance of their painful bodily states. It discusses some contributions to our understanding of superego pathology in the psychosomatic patients, and explains the importance of language to superego regulation. C. Philip Wilson was pre-eminent in the use of a superego-centered position with psychosomatic patients, but he was obviously not alone in recognizing the regulatory importance of superego structure, dynamics, and analysis. Wilson appreciated the traumatic impact of maternal failure, and recognized the concrete and alexithymic clinical presentation of many psychosomatic patients. There is a compelling similarity between the analytic techniques for facilitating treatment with psychosomatic patients and the use parents normally make of sound and language with their young children. In the families of psychosomatic patients, a pattern emerged of repressive and perfectionistic parenting that fostered suppression, repression, splitting, denial, and dissociation.
