ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the Paris Psychosomatic School is strictly Freudian and rooted in concepts such as the drive, representation, and transference. In anxiety neurosis, it is observed that a symmetric and opposite mechanism from that of conversion hysteria: the conversion would be a leap of the psychic sexual into the soma; it conserves the link with symbolization. Referring to the psychosomatic phenomenon and the link between psyche and soma poses the problem of the drive head-on. The few words of Freud’s definition of the drive are crucial and contain nested within it the entire psychoanalytic theory, as well as the psychosomatic corpus. The chapter focuses on Freud’s description of the unconscious of the first topography. The second topography gives an anthropomorphic and psychodynamic vision of a less demarcated ego that is also a repressing agency whose defensive operations are, in large measure, unconscious.
