[Early psychoanalytic concepts of pain]

Abstract

It is amazing how small a proportion of the very extensive psychoanalytic literature is devoted to the psychoanalytic understanding of pain and how much less to a pain-theory. Reviewing the history of psychoanalytically orientated pain-concepts up to 1933--mostly concerning "psychogenic" pain--Sigmund Freuds remarks are reaching from autobiographical notices up to his case histories ("Studien über Hysterie"), in which pain is one of the dominating conversionsymptoms. Psychoanalytic observations on pain are also made by Sandor Ferenczi, Wilhelm Stekel, Edoardo Weiss, Anna Freud and Ernst Simmel--one of the pioneers in psychosomatic research--who developed an unknown theory of an earliest postnatal intestinal libido for a better understanding of somatogenic pain.