Cuando el cuerpo habla

When we decided to embark on the adventure of writing about conversion disorder, we raised a fundamental idea: write what we would have liked to find when we began to research and treat patients with this disorder. Rather than collect diverse information in an exhaustive way, we wanted to make, as far as possible, an integration of this information with two central objectives. The first is to understand how these pathologies originate and develop. The second, inseparable from the first, propose a specific therapeutic approach. Understanding the origin is itself a therapeutic intervention when done collaboratively with the patient. For the professional, it is also the guide for intervention in a pathology more characterized by the diversity of clinical presentations and relational contexts than by its uniformity. Clinical sessions in psychiatry services rarely revolve around conversational pictures, but rather become uncomfortable patients, difficult to understand and to fit into the general scheme of those who must take care of them. Something quite different happened in the past, when psychoanalysis pivoted on these disorders a large part of its theoretical articulations and its therapeutic proposals.