Desomatization and the consequences of infantile psychic trauma

Emotion Regulation and Mentalization in Somatoform Disorders

“…Here, representational activities that have been acquired during development are deactivated, and thinking about extremely painful experiences and the conscious experience of the related feelings are replaced by the experience of an overall negative psychosomatic state, for example, by undifferentiated somatoform pain. Krystal (1997) also stated that children who are neglected or traumatized early in life may never mentally mature to a level at which they will be able to mentally represent affect and related fantasies or cognitions as symbols or words.…”

The Assessment of Alexithymia in Medical Settings: Implications for Understanding and Treating Health Problems

“…Theoretically, however, alexithymia could result from trauma or stress. Although early childhood trauma, abuse, or neglect has been linked with alexithymia later in life (Krystal, 1997), most clinicians consider this to be primary alexithymia. In contrast, the question here is whether trauma, stress, or even health problems during adolescence or adulthood can trigger alexithymia, socalled secondary alexithymia.…”

Disadvantageous decision-making profiles in substance dependents / Patrón de toma de decisiones. Desventajosas en pacientes drogodependientes

“…Las fallas en la función materna (falta de reverie) no le proporcionan al niño las funciones autorreguladoras de la emoción (Kohut, 1971;en Acuña-Gutiérrez, 2003). Estas perturbaciones afectivas en el desarrollo temprano alteran la posibilidad de discriminar los afectos, y en consecuencia se adquiere una vivencia de los afectos preponderantemente somática en detrimento de la vivencia afectiva regulada por medio del orden simbólico (Krystal, 1997). Asimismo, la perturbación en el reconocimiento de los afectos frecuentemente deriva de la necesidad de bloquear memorias traumáticas.…”