ABSTRACT
Somatization and its various guises is an extremely common problem in all areas of medicine and mental health. It creates a major public health and economic problem since functional symptoms are among the leading causes of work and social disability. The relationship of somatization to psychiatric diagnoses or disorder is thus the clinical challenge. Psychodynamic theory confounded a mechanism in symptom production-conversion with a clinical presentation of multiple unexplained somatic symptoms in many different organ systems—"hysteria". This chapter shows the method of interviewing which allows the clinician to have significant impact on the process of somatization. It provides two cases with severe somatizing disorders which were impacting the patients' social and personal lives. The first case is a consultation with only partial improvement, and the second case is a patient who underwent the whole therapy and has complete improvement.
