Abstract
We found, in an empirical study on 53 people affected by cancer, of both sexes, that, according to previous researches, they take on a peculiar defensive style. The defensive styles differences between cancer patients and the comparison group resulted, by the mean of State Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI) and Defense Mechanism Inventory (DMI), statistically significant. The cancer patients resulted to be “controlling-introverted”. These results can be considered an additional evidence of a tie, till obscure, between the somatic disease, even in its extreme form, and the subjective psychodynamic organisation. Such evidences are often the result of a research activity referred to traditional studies leading to the different meanings of “psychosomatics”. As we can see from the epistolary relation between Freud and Groddeck and the latter and Ferenczi, this tradition crossed lot of times the path of psychoanalysis. In some cases, such crosses seem to produce a deviation, evident in the frequent simplification of the potential senses of the same crosses. We think with no doubt that the link body-mind can be studied with advantage starting from the same idea of the unconscious presented by Freud in the famous letter to Groddeck (1917) as the possible “missing link” between the physical and the psychical. However, we think that a study starting from such a point should not limit itself to seeing in the unconscious collocation of the link an almost nominalistic entity, pushing the knowledge towards the “more” implied in the unconscious nature of the link. Starting from those empirical data we propose a representation of the elements in transit on the bridge linking the mind to the body affected by cancer. We want to consider the relationship between the self-conservative body and the libidinal body in the light of a “critic” to the anaclisis (Anlehnung) theory.
Highlights
Medical research over the last decades has shed light on almost everything that needs to be known on the pathogenesis of malignant tumours
Significant
The hypothesis of a typical and stable pattern which determines the economic organisation of these subjects does not prevent us from searching for a more specific psychic signification, even when significant effects fall into the “outside psyche” that is the somatic basis [18]
Summary
Medical research over the last decades has shed light on almost everything that needs to be known on the pathogenesis of malignant tumours They are genetic mutations which cause certain cells, which had differentiated into different tissues, to return to an embryo state. One of the psychoanalysts who first developed an interest in the psychological variables entailed in the onset of tumours was Groddeck, who argued that the Es had the potential to develop a symptom in the body in the same way as it produces a dream, extending the concept of hysterical conversion to all the diseases of the body (on this topic, see Felix Deutsch’s work) It was Alexander’s work that originated most of the studies which identify a psychosomatic area. These points to the similarities existing with the alexithymia construct, which expresses the difficulty of perceiving and expressing one’s emotions
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