Disorders of emotional containment and their somatic correlates. The protomenta...

• Author(s): Torres, Nuno
• Date: 2008
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.12/1678
• Origin: Repositório do ISPA - Instituto Universitário
• Subject(s): Psicanálise; Perturbações; Stress; Emoções; Psicossomática; Alexitimia; Acontecimentos de vida; Bion; Instrumentos; Saúde mental; Psicologia do desenvolvimento; Psychoanalysis; Development psychology; Psychossomatic disorders; Stress; Emotions; Psychosomatics; Alexithymia; Life events; Instruments; Mental health; Psychoanalysis
• Document Type: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: English

Description

Tese de Doutoramento apresentada à University of Essex, Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies This study is concerned with the emotional nature of determined forms of illness which seem to be largely determined by stressful social conditions rather than as a consequence of primarily biologic and somatic factors, and have been identified with labels such as "diseases of comfort, lifestyle related diseases", "degenerative causes of death". The models we have for understanding the mechanisms by which human subjects are affected by social environment stresses are still tentative, although some of the diversity of the psychosocial factors is reasonably well established. This thesis is an exploration of the theories of Wilfred Bion, which offer an under-researched approach to the nature and origin of such conditions. I have chosen three of these conditions as the subject of this study -drug and alcohol dependence, self-harming behaviours and a certain set of psychosomatic conditions - to test whether predictions formulated from the hypotheses are supported by a set of empirical measures. The hypotheses are that a determined type of emotional containment mechanism can affect certain types of health outcomes via disturbing the natural expression of primitive emotional systems embedded in the human organism. These primitive emotional systems are known as basic assumptions or valencies and are of 3 main types: dependence, fight-flight and pairing A mixed research methodology combining qualitative and quantitative methods was used: A total of 377 participants were assessed, 65,5% of whom were suffering clinical conditions: psychosomatic conditions, addiction disorders and suicide attempts, while the rest of the subjects were non-clinical. The qualitative section comprised life-story interviews. In the quantitative section, two self-administered questionnaire instruments were used: 1) the Work-Group-Function ScaIes-1.02 to measure valencies, and 2) the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 to measure a cognitive deficit of emotional containment. Results are compatible with the hypothesis that the disorders under study are associated with similar emotional containment mechanisms, comprising of two main components in response to stressful interpersonal events: 1) A deficit in translating raw affects into words and symbolic elements 2) Oscillation between fragmented and rigid modes of emotional containment.