Emotion and the motions: an inquiry into the causes and prevention of functional disorders of defecation

The common factor in problems of adolescence*

“…But parental hostility is itself a psychiatric symptom-with understandable origins (Woodmansey, 1966 b)-and cannot be dispelled by exhortation. Yet its reduction is essential for helping the patients and parents concerned (as well as for further testing of the present hypothesis), which emphasizes the pressing need, in psychiatric training, to equip students with the psychotherapeutic skill to allay hostility in patients and their relatives (Woodmansey, 1967~).…”

“…Many psychosomatic disturbances can be explained on the samc basis; for some may be regarded as component parts of anxiety states, or-in the case of hysterical dysfunctions-as unconscious devices for evading anxiety ; others -like chronic constipation-are often a direct result of punishment conditioning (Huschka, 1942;Anthony, 1957;Woodmansey, 1967b); while those of a particularly important group -including ulcerative colitis (Paulley, 1950;Prugh, 1951;Groen & Bastiaans, 1955), childhood asthma (Kogerson, 1937;Miller & Baruch, 1950, 1960 and adult essential hypertension (Saul, 1939;Wolff, 1947;Hambling, 1951)-appcar to arise during an inner struggle (like that leading to the obsessional and depressive states) to inhibit the individual's own counter-aggression towards parent figures.…”

Internal Conflict

“…Since a healthy child will at first resist such attack, punishment and retaliation will provoke each other in turn until the child can stand no more. Yet, he will often be unable to escape, either because the parent prevents this, or because -as in coercive toilet training (Woodmansey 1967) -the parent makes a demand that it is not physically possible for him to obey. Nor will he be able to switch off his defiance however much he wants to; indeed, the harder he is attacked the more intense and uncontrollable will be his urge to fight back (because the punitive obstruction to this will itself be felt as a hostile frustration).…”

“…Many kinds of somatic dysfunction can be seen to relate in different ways to the superego conflict. Moreover, even before it is internalised, the external struggle may apparently cause lasting interference with normal bodily functions and so produce conditions such as dyschezia (Woodmansey 1967) and feeding and genital inhibitions.…”

Wetting and soiling.

“…9 Likewise, soiling is often very obviously related to conflict and distress;5 [10][11][12] thus in a recent series of 60 encopretic children12 every one showed other definite signs of emotional disorder or was under considerable stress (usually both), and the majority appeared to have been persistently punished.…”