ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some semantic considerations and call to mind that, in Ancient Greece, "soma"–the body–did not take on the current meaning of "living organism" until after the fifth century b.c. and Hippocrates. While Hippocratic medicine has laid the foundations for a psychosomatic approach–that is, for an understanding of health in terms of a somato-psychic equilibrium–the movement embodied in the Paris Psychosomatic School could only have sprung from the discovery of the psychoanalytic method. The great complexity of the psychosomatic clinic is due to the difficulties in assessing, on the basis of psychoanalytic theory, disorders that, as it were, do not correspond to a strictly mental semiology. However, the absence of such disorders is precisely a function of psychic activity. The psychosomatician is frequently confronted with physical suffering that is neither denied nor particularly invested and may go hand in hand with what seems to be a passive, aconflictual acceptance of treatment.
