Experimental intervention program in psychosomatic pathology

Abstract

Introduction

The work of Bion, developing the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Klein on the origins of anxiety in childhood, includes the hypothesis of a protomental system as a matrix in the human organism in which physical and mental are at first undifferentiated. He defends that the continuing experience by the infant of parental containment of its anxieties, through a process of projection and introjection, develops its capacity for thinking about frustration rather than evading it. This conception was extended to psychosomatic illness, by the hypothesis that, without this experience, frustration may lead to basic assumption mentality and psychosomatic illness rather than emotions and thought.

Objectives

This work aims to describe an experimental technique of group psychotherapy, inspired in Bion's principles combined with relaxation techniques, in the context of psychosomatic diseases.

Aims

The authors pretend to identify improvement in clinical symptomatology, quality of life, identification and expression of emotions, in the group submitted to this method, compared to controls.

Methods

It was performed a weekly group psychotherapeutic session and a weekly relaxation session (using Jacobson's method), along two months. The patients were randomly selected and submitted to psychological evaluation with scales and questionnaires, in the beginning and at the end of the study.

Results

At the time of submission of this work, the results of the intervention were in analysis.

Conclusions

This paper describes an experimental method of psychotherapeutic intervention in the field of psychosomatic disease, using a transdisciplinary perspective.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.