ABSTRACT
The symptoms of both conversion hysteria and psychosomatic disease are painful and tormenting to patients suffering from them. The suffering entailed in our symptoms gratifies the superego need for punishment and, at the same time, evades unbearable conscious guilt. Psychosomatic illness involves somatisation as distinct from conversion or mimetic imitation. Both classical Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis have emphasised the role in hysteria of such factors as forbidden sexual wishes, unresolved Oedipal conflicts, castration anxiety, the need for attachment, and the compulsion to preserve object ties or a threatened sense of self. In Todd Haynes’s film, Safe, Carol White is an affluent but bored suburban housewife who appears, at the outset, to be suffering from a personality disorder of a schizoid type characterised by identity diffusion, anhedonia, diffuse anxiety, and “emptiness depression”. In the face of frustration and feelings of persecution, the infant reacts with both fear and aggression; projection of the latter leads to further persecutory anxiety.
