This paper argues that anorexia may be understood to be a particular kind of autistoid psychic retreat: a defensive withdrawal to a primitive enclosed part of the self that has been damaged by early infantile trauma, the result of a disruption to the mother–infant pair. This damage can be envisaged as an enclosed ‘cyst’ or ‘tumour,’ defensively ‘sectioned off’ from the rest of the individual’s ...

This paper deals with certain psychic automatisms that appear suddenly in the consciousness of the subject in a passive or automatic way and that usually are diagnosed as psychiatric symptoms or manifestations of an epileptic partial seizure. These mental automatisms are described in many writings by mystics, philosophers, literates, composers, and many different great artists and creators from...

Some nineteenth-century hypnosis researchers did not limit their interest to the study of the conventional psychological and behavioral aspects of hypnosis, but also studied and wrote about psychic phenomena such as mental suggestion and clairvoyance. One example, and the topic of this paper, was French physician Ambroise August Liébeault (1823-1904), who influenced the Nancy school of hypnosis...

The aim in this study is to understand the child hospitalized family perceptions about the psychic suffering, to identify the presence of situation in the childcare that caused the stress and the defensive strategies used by the family. The data was obtained with semi-structured interview. The qualitative analysis followed the texts interpretation. The mother is exposed to different pressures t...

Where ‘soul’ and ‘body’ are traditionally viewed (following Descartes) as two separate entities belonging to two different realities, today this is by no means the case. A large number of studies in the areas of psychopathology and orthopedagogy have already been carried out from which it seems clear that the inadequate actualization of either lived bodiliness [corporeality] or the psychic life...

In this paper the author offers a phenomenology and a metapsychology for the effects on the mind of catastrophic psychic trauma, defined as the reaction of the psyche to an utterly external event, which the person is helpless to resist, and against which there is no possible defense. The author affirms that the experience of 'infinite affliction' produces a radical break in being which disartic...

Choukèr, A., M. Thiel, V. Baranov, D. Meshkov, A. Kotov, K. Peter, K. Messmer, and F. Christ. Simulated microgravity, psychic stress, and immune cells in men: observations during 120-day 6° HDT. J Appl Physiol 90: 1736–1743, 2001.—Because 6° head-down tilt (HDT) is an established method to mimic low gravity on earth, the aim of the present study was to determine the effects of 120-day HDT on ps...