ME/CFS SKeptic: A new blog series on the dark history of psychosomatic medicine

DokaGirl said:
When I was first diagnosed in the early 1990s, a psychologist told me I have a type A personality and that's why I had "cfs".

Type A people as the ME/CFS Skeptic article says, are ambitious, aggressive and very competitive.

This therapist diagnosed me as Type A, just a short while into our first or second session. I went to that therapist for help, and much of what I got was criticism, dismissal, and a poor assessment of my personality. A cookie-cutter approach. I am motivated, and sometimes competitive, but not aggressive.

It's interesting that some psychs blamed pwME for having Type A personalities, which includes being ambitious (motivated). And, other psychs blamed pwME for not being motivated. Hhhmmmm..... the twists and turns with their belief systems!
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I often also see this as: motivated, competitive, aggressive Type A personality = patients who don't agree with me about this CFS thing.

But otherwise yes, you can fit almost everyone in those two categories if you try hard enough.
 
Wyva said:
I often also see this as: motivated, competitive, aggressive Type A personality = patients who don't agree with me about this CFS thing.

But otherwise yes, you can fit almost everyone in those two categories if you try hard enough.
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Absolutely, yes. I recall, the psychologist I saw over 30 years ago, felt very strongly that "cfs" was a mental health issue caused by a problematic personality type. I presented it as a physiological disease. This was aggressively disagreed with by the psych.
 
:rofl: The summary is indeed quite something.
a little bit of the summary said:
The situation of predisposition to ulcer is constituted by various factors. One of them is the lack of genital instinctive gratification which is experienced regressively as hunger due to the lack of food and which injures the digestive tract. The others are the possible psychic memory traces of the trauma of umbilical separation from the mother, fear of genital castration, carried out regressively in the digestive tract, and the remorse due to aggressive wishes against the mother, or related objects, which is felt as a digestive bite by the mother introjected in the super-ego.
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The things humans are able to believe, and convince others of, continues to surprise me.
 
ME/CFS Skeptic said:
This seems to be the author, Angel Garma, the 'founder' of psychoanalysis in Argentina. He has his own Wikipedia page:
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If any of us should ever feel despondent at the limited impact we have made on the world, we can think of Angel Garma, and console ourselves with the knowledge that our life's work did not consist of producing and promoting fantastical drivel that harmed many people.
 
Broadly, psychosomatic medicine changed into biopsychosocial model somewhere around the 1970s while psychoanalysis was replaced by cognitive behavioral therapy.

Given how absurd psychoanalytic theory was, I guess many students of psychoanalytic oriented professors must feel that great progress has been made during their careers. If you started out learning about "genital instinctive gratification" and "fear of genital castration" as the causes of peptic ulcer, then suggesting fear avoidance as a cause of medically unexplained symptoms might seem quite rational.
 
ME/CFS Skeptic said:
Anyone who can help finding this paper on psychoanalytic interpretation of peptic ulcer?
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I am speechless... :jawdrop: Well, it seems that psychoanalysis has something of the secret of a sect, since despite the many decades that have passed (this journal dates from 1950 !), it is still impossible to consult it unless you buy it. I only found the following article by the same author on this subject, but in French (use google translation to read it in English :)). Although the review is from 2007, references in this article range from 1934 to 1958, and Angel Garma appears to have died in 1993.
https://www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-de-psychosomatique-2004-2-page-7.htm#no1
 
My father had rheumatoid arthritis, and

"repressed hostility, a domineering personality and a rejection of the feminine role in society" fits him very well! Except that the hostility wasn't very well repressed.

That said, it was probably nothing to do with his rheumatoid arthritis!
 
John Mac said:
Merged thread

The dark psychosomatic history of rheumatoid arthritis

https://mecfsskeptic.com/the-dark-psychosomatic-history-of-rheumatoid-arthritis/

ETA: Showing as updated yesterday
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"In the past, rheumatoid arthritis was sometimes described as a psychosomatic condition. This view was inspired by the periods of subsidence and recurrence seen in patients with the illness. Many thought that such fluctuations were due to psychosocial factors.
The foremost proponent of this view was Franz Alexander. Working at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, the Hungarian-born Alexander was one of the leading figures in the American psychosomatic movement. In a 1947 paper, he and his colleagues lied the groundwork for a psychosomatic theory of rheumatoid arthritis."

My bolding - is that what you call a Freudian slip?
 
John Mac said:
In the past, rheumatoid arthritis was sometimes described as a psychosomatic condition.
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I knew someone with severe rheumatoid arthritis over many years. Their joints were swollen, and finger joints looked as though they had marbles growing in them. I find it impossible to believe that such effects could be psychosomatic, and I find it incredible that anyone could take such ideas seriously.
 
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