ABSTRACT
Psychosomatic illnesses face people's with both theoretical and clinical challenges. The subject of psychosomatics spreads across many disciplines, and within psychoanalysis itself people's encounter many different ways of conceptualizing psychosomatic illnesses. The notion of "proto-mental" was further developed and extended by Bion into the concept of the soma-psychotic. Bion discussed the replacement of the contact barrier by a beta screen mainly in connection to psychotic functioning where the reversal of alpha function takes to the destruction of the contact barrier and does violence to it. It is not just a return to beta elements but a forming of bizarre objects. Where people's can find the formation of a beta screen is in patients affected by severe psychosomatic illnesses where the part of the ill body seems to carry the projections of unprocessed beta elements and can form a beta screen.
