ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis was born at the end of the nineteenth century, in the heyday of the microscope and of the promise of certainty offered by a medicine rooted in the positivist approach to science; it originated in the unexpected discovery of "ordinary unhappiness" (Breuer & Freud, 1895d), concealed behind a heterogeneous series of somatic symptoms known as "hysterical conversion". Despite expectations, neither cellular lesions nor bacteria could explain these disorders (Freud, 1888). Therefore, it was not easy to categorise the aforementioned unhappiness within the framework of positivist science; rather, it was vaguely described as "the circumstances and events of one's life ' (Freud, 1895d). Very soon, a wide array of nosological entities with an evident organic incidence and an uncertain or unknown aetiology joined the ranks of ailments incorporated in the young science under the name of psychosomatic disorders. These successive steps led to drastic modifications in contemporary medical conceptions which could not disregard psychoanalysis in the process of understanding not only the doctor-patient relationship but also its psychopathological explanations. Psychoanalysis, in turn, profited 232from the enriching experience derived from these new fields; and the scientific and philosophical debate on the nature of the mind and the psyche-soma relationship grew and was revitalised (Rabossi, 1995).
