Tiempo ambiental, vivencia corporal y mundo interno

Abstract

In this contribution, hypochindriasis is studied from the psychoanalytic viewpoint and in the third part, a phenomenological consideration of the encounter with “the other one”, through the body, enables us to understand or rather to de-veil, that human relations in everyday life —which cannot be grasped in an intellectualistic, non-intentional psychological description— are of the same general nature as the analyst-patiene experiences, both in as far as they constitute an “original experience”.
In the first part, a summary’ of the historical development of the subject bypochondriasis through the works of Freud, Fenichel, Melanie Klein, H. Rosenfeld and Paula Heimann is made. In the second part, the analytic material of a patient with hypochondriac complaints is presented, showing his dependency on his internalized persecutory objects (parental figures, specially the mother’s body, the combined couple, etc.) experienced through his body as an assault of internal destruction and through the weather, as a menace to his bodily integrity. This last situation: protection of his inner world on the weather, the author calls “external hypochondrmasms
The patient’s phantasy that the interior of his body is destroyed, as well as his cruel oedipical death wishes against his father, are determinated by the impulses of destruction directed against the mother’s body and more especifically against the combined parental couple. These destructive phantasies derive from very intense primitive greed.
The conclusions of the author agree with H. Rosenfeld’s thesis in the sense that oral envy, —as a consequence of uncontrollable greed—, produces as Melanie Klein pointed out, a primitive mental confusion which makes the separation (dissociation) between good and bad objects unachievable.
According to the first author, a projection of the confusional situation on the external objects takes place (because it cannot be elaborated), and it is afterwards reintrojected in the body (hypochondriasis).
The projection of internal persecutory objects and parts of oneself on the external world, is what is experienced as “external hypochondriasis” in the menace of the weather.
This interplay between internal objects, the world and the body of the individual, is also experienced by the “average man” phenomenological investigation proves; whereas a too rationalized approach makes us unable to grasp it in its originality.