ABSTRACT
Speaking about the manifestations of the dynamic unconscious in psychosomatic patients calls for a few preliminary remarks. Since the 1950s, different schools of psychosomatics, defending various theoretical models, have argued about the question of the unconscious meaning of somatic symptoms. Groddeck was the first to attribute an unconscious significance to every organic manifestation. Freud reproached him in a letter dated June 5, 1917 for making no real difference between the somatic and the psychic (Freud, E. L., 1960, pp. 316–318). In 1963, at a Congress for French-speaking analysts held in Paris, 2 Angel Garma and Michel de M’Uzan took up contrasting positions, the first arguing that the treatment of physical illnesses must seek to unearth the unconscious fantasy underlying them and interpret it as in a classical analysis, while, for the second, “the somatic symptom is stupid”, precisely because it has no meaning, but is evidence of a traumatic excess that overwhelms the capacities of the psychical apparatus for elaboration, thus obliging the subject to find other paths of discharge for excitation, whether behavioural or somatic.
