THEATERS of the BODY A PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH TO PSYCHOSOMATIC ILLNESS

why Theaters of the Body” as a title? While writing Theaters of the Mind (McDougall, 1982a), I slowly became aware, as so often happens when one is writing, that a further book was developing out of the one in which I was involved. In choosing the theater as a metaphor for psychic reality, I was perhaps following m the steps of Anna O who, at the turn of the century, referred to her free associations during her therapy with Breuer (Breuer and Freud, 1893-1895), as her “private theater.” My first challenge was an attempt at understanding the underlying meaning of the complex psychic scenarios that give rise to sexual deviations (Mc- Dougall, 1964). Even then I became aware that the creation of inner “theater scripts,” which, though written in early childhood, have a lasting effect on the adult mind, extended also to neurotic and to psychosomatic manifestations. I had also observed among patients who were neither neurotic, nor psychotic, nor sexually deviant, another elusive manifestation that I called “pseudo-normality”; this led to the publication in 1978 oi A Plea for a Measure ofAbnormality. Later, when I came to write Theaters of the Mind I was concerned with sorting out the different places in which the mind’s “I” plays out its hidden dramas, along with the accompanying scenarios, and characters, that make up the psychic repertory. Having dealt with what I called the “neurotic theater,” followed by the “psychotic,” the “transitional,” and the “narcissistic” theaters, I found myself struggUng with a theater that I named, provisionally, “the psychosoma on the psychoanalytic stage.” This proved to be too vast a subject to be enclosed within Theaters of the Mind, and, in fact, threatened to take over the whole book. It is evident that “Theaters of the Body” had been claiming my attention as a title long before I began writing the book.