from Psychosomatics to Soma-Semiotics by Wilberg Peter

Author:Wilberg, Peter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

Case Example 3

“A patient with whom I was working was dying of stomach cancer. He was lying in the hospital bed, groaning and moaning in pain. Have you ever seen someone who is dying? It was really quite sad and terrifying. They flip quickly between trance states, ordinary consciousness and extreme pain. Once, when he was able to speak, he told me that the tumour in his stomach was unbearably painful. I had had an idea that we should focus on his proprioception, that is, his experience of the pain, so I told him that since he’d already been operated on unsuccessfully, we might try something new. He agreed, and so I suggested that try to make the pain even worse.

He said he knew exactly how he could do that and told me that the pain felt like something in his stomach trying to break out. If he helped it break out, he said, the pain worsened. He lay on his back and started to increase the pressure in his stomach. He pushed his stomach out and kept pushing and pressing and exaggerating the pain until he felt as if he were going to explode. Suddenly, at the height of his pain, he said ‘Oh, Arny, I just want to explode!’. At that point he switched out of his body experience and began to talk to me. He told me that he needed to explode and asked if I would help him to do so. ‘My problem’, he said ‘is that I’ve never expressed myself sufficiently, and even when I do it’s never enough.’

This problem is an ordinary, psychological problem that appears in many cases, but with him it became somatised and was pressing him now, urgently expressing itself in the form of a tumour. That was the end of our physical work together. He lay back and felt much better. Though he had been given only a short time to live and had been on the verge of death, his condition improved and he was discharged from the hospital. I went to see him afterwards very often, and every time he ‘exploded’ with me. He’d make noises, shout and scream, with absolutely no encouragement on my part.

… It was then also that I discovered the vital link between dreams and body symptoms. Shortly before he had entered the hospital, the patient dreamed that he an incurable disease and that the medicine for it was like a bomb. When I asked him about the bomb he made a very emotional sound and cried like bomb dropping in the air, ‘it goes up in the air and spins around sshhhss … pfftfff.’ At that moment I knew that the cancer was the bomb in his dream … his body was literally exploding with pent-up expression. In this way his pain became his own medicine …

In a flash I discovered that there must be something like a dreambody, an entity which is both dream and body at once … The way I discovered the concept of the dreambody was through what I called amplification.

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