Psychosocial Press, New York, 1999

"Even though medicine is progressing in its capacity to answer the question of how the illness came into being, the old question... of why... remains unanswered." To provide answers is this book's purpose. The method for obtaining them is the pathobiographical study, developed at the Weizsaecker Center for Medical Consultations in Buenos Aires. The pathobiographical study comprises both the traditional "clinical history" and the "biographical" history, which seeks to discover how key events make sense in the context of the patient's entire life.

The author holds that "the psyche must be considered... as the concrete quality of meaning that constitutes a story, since a story is always built upon the importance of a meaning," and that the unconscious is equivalent to "the specific meaning of that which consciousness records as the body." Building upon Freud's idea that affects derive from organismic responses appropriate in an earlier stage of phylogeny, Dr. Chiozza finds that when an affect's innervation key is distorted, the affect is perceived as a somatic process.

Six histories-respectively, of patients with intractable hand pain, myocardial infarction, ocular herpes, melanoma, multiple sclerosis, and leukemia-document the insights afforded by this approach and support the thesis that psychological treatment of "somatic" disorders may improve the outcome of therapy.

Puede adquirirse en librerías y en la FUNDACION LUIS CHIOZZA, Vedia 1661 (Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires).