Libidinal Cathexis and Emotional Growth in the Analytical Treatment of Psychosomatic Patients

Abstract

The paper deals with a form of analytical therapy in psychosomatics, which was developed and applied for many years in a model research ward. The therapeutic arrangement, or setting, was designed to make provision for all 3 elements of a person's make-up - his environment, his mind and his body. At the heart of the model is the therapeutic team, which offers the patient empathatic 'holding' and encourages his emotional growth. The members of the team have learned to offer themselves to the patient as a unit with a common inner attitude towards him. This means that they must first have worked out a unified approach, a hermeneutic structure, with which to understand him. Against the background of a special genetic conception of a mother's function for her child, the ward was turned into a setting that confronts the patient, in psychodramatized form, with a specific form of 'physical ambience'. In coming to grips with the team's physical, sensual presence, the patient is stimulated into developing a transference relationship to the empathizing, maternal father-figure, the 'père maternel'. In this way he can break loose from his clinging dependency on an 'omnipotent object', his dyadic partner, and, through internalizing the therapist both in his female and his male aspects, create a libidinal object in his inner world.