ABSTRACT
Papageorgiou, coming from the same school of psychosomatics, but with a focus different from Aloupis, elaborates on the original and rigorous conception of the processes of somatization through the lenses of affect. In this evocative clinical chapter, a patient who suffers from severe diabetes enters therapy to deal with the distress and anxiety associated with his illness, only to discover that he is a man who suffers from alexithymia (no words for feelings). The analyst utilizes her own preconscious mental functioning to help this somatic patient mentalize his own affect. Papageorgiou builds on Andre Green’s situating affect at the core of mental functioning and Claude Smadja’s original concept of the silence in psychosomatic praxis that describes the operational state in which the subject has become devoid of affect as a particular thought. Such children always behave well, having received the message from the mother that they cannot cause her any trouble by having their own affective and instinctual reality. Thus, the analyst must use her preconscious to decipher the patient’s unarticulated affect and to facilitate the patient’s capacity for mental functioning, lifting the burden from the body.
