The Ego and the Psychosomatic State Report of Two Cases

a psychotherapeutic relationship revealed meaningful data that could be organized into a theoretical framework and thereby add to an understanding of psychosomatic reactions. In a previous paper the author12 dis-cusses the fruitfulness of investigating pa-tients who were found to have two or more coexisting syndromes, each of which could be considered from a psychosomatic view-point. Here I will report two cases, both of them in psychoanalytic treatment. Although there were no coexisting organ neuroses these cases were especially interest-ing in that during treatment they recovered from one somatic symptom and then devel-oped another which had never previously existed. This phenomenon is well known but will be explored further in terms of the transference neurosis, with special focus on the ego's operations. I will attempt to cor-relate levels of ego integration and psycho-economic shifts with the somatic syndrome. Naturally, in summarizing the psychoana-lytic data I have had to extract from a voluminous mass of material