“The mysterious leap” -- the flight from mind into body -- has long intrigued analysts as much as it has intimidated them. Anyone working in this genre will recognize the peril of the undertaking—and understands that mistakes on the analyst’s part may result in the death of the patient.

The mind-body dichotomy is a problem. If we think of steam, water, and ice, we understand they are fundamentally the same: H2O. There is the mind and the body, but we have to think of the body as “body-mind,” another state of being for the mind as we know “mind.” In health the body-mind functions smoothly. In illness there is disruption because various organs and systems are being asked to do jobs they are not designed to do. We know the cell has its own regulatory system, like the mind has its ego (the mind’s regulatory system). Instead of the physiologic tasks body systems do autonomously, with psychosomatic illness these systems are intruded upon by painfully conflicted trains of feelings and thoughts -- often layer upon layer of them -- burdening the body systems, stopping or diverting their normal functions. The analyst’s task is to get all working smoothly again – to get the mind and body doing their respective jobs. I am principally speaking about such entities as asthma, allergic skin conditions, and the gastro-intestinal system, particularly ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease.

If we humans come into existence as a unitary organism, then both body and mind are working in perfect harmony, at least for a little while. Soon, for some, a condition such as colic develops. What has happened is that the cooperation between the body and mind has been disrupted. It is an understanding of this disruption that will be at the core of the analytic work, and will provide a central challenge for the analyst as well as the patient, if the patient ever reaches back to that point in his or her life.

The essence of the issue is this: The baby is unwittingly thrust into this maelstrom of birth, an immense physical trial, and is also the recipient of whatever exists of the mother’s unconscious, unresolved, painful feelings and experiences in the form of projections into the infant’s nascent being. The infant’s reception of these unconscious projections by the mother splits the baby’s mind – and constitutes the first split in the baby’s mind – the initial “disruption.” This process will leave an imprint on the baby’s mind, the mother’s imprint, and it will become the infant’s destiny. Psychosomatic illnesses are further splits following the fault line laid down by the original mental split. (Here, one has to consider the enormous force it takes to crack the physical integrity of organs and/or systems of the human organism).

My many years of analytic work based on meticulous attention to the dreams of patients has revealed that in order to save itself, the infant attempts to keep these projections – but at the same time attempts to isolate them and then save the mother (an omnipotent fantasy so as to ensure its own survival).

The first business of life is always survival; all else is secondary. And at the heart of all illness, psychic (mind) or psychosomatic (body-mind), is survival. Depending on the nature of these early projections – that is, depending on the psychic health or illness of the mother – the baby, originallyinjured,may later in life develop a neurosis, a borderline state, a psychotic or psychosomatic state, a character disorder, or any number of other emotional and physical illnesses.

Since the original state is the natural state, it becomes imperative to treat the patient toward that end. We must reverse the physical illness that we rightly understand to be a concretization of the aforementioned conflict. To reverse a concretized state of being is an Herculean task, but it can be done if that state is tracked carefully and accurately, and if we reverse, piece by piece, the events that caused the initial flight from the mindand emotions towards the physical body. It is here, in the physical body, where the patient experiences his illness as entirely divorced from his mental life. The illness is experienced as something that “just happens,” something that comes from God. The patient’s understanding in this way is a defense against the true meaning that would put the patient into incalculable mental pain (but that would, ultimately, heal the patient), which is the reason for the flight from the mindoriginally.

. My theory is culled from not only working with psychosomatic states, but from working with all the states mentioned above. In a case of Crohn’s disease, I will explicate through the patient’s dreams and associations the ways that an unendurable mental state caused a young girl to develop Crohn’s.

Finally, one might say that life itself is a psychosomatic illness if we consider how much illness runs throughout our population, in whatever country. And that if the best state of being is to be in one’s mind—that is, to be aware—then we realize how we are inundated by headaches, stomach upsets, flues, colds. The list is endless. And each of these disorders keeps us “out of our minds” for varying lengths of time.