Psyche, soma, and society: the social construction of psychosomatic disorders

Abstract

This pilot-study examines the self-perceptions, and explanatory models, of 42 patients with either respiratory or gastrointestinal psychosomatic disorders. For several reasons, these disorders comprise an anomalous category within the biomedical model. It is suggested that clinicians explain their chronic, unpredictable course by 'psychologization'--shifting responsibility for etiology, exacerbations or therapeutic failure to patients' emotions, personality, or lifestyle. Evidence is presented that psychologization is socially constructed, in clinical encounters over time. Patients respond to this process by reifying pathogenic emotions, personality traits, or malfunctioning body parts, and thus separating them from an idealized concept of the social self. It is also suggested that patients with gastrointestinal or respiratory conditions differ in their self-perceptions and explanatory models: a proportion of patients in each group organize their experiences around a central natural symbol--respiration or digestion/excretion. These 2 images link physiological experiences to concepts of pathogenic emotions or personality, physical weakness, and types of social relationships.