Somatization

Somatization is the generation of physical symptoms by psychological distress, often paired with a tendency to seek medical treatment for those symptoms even when no fully explanatory physical cause can be found. The psychiatrist Wilhelm Stekel introduced the term in 1924, and it has since been recognized as a phenomenon documented worldwide. In psychodynamic theory, somatization is understood as an unconscious process in which repressed emotion is converted into bodily complaints that indirectly communicate distress the person cannot otherwise express; Sigmund Freud's case study of the patient known as Anna O. is among the historical examples used to illustrate the pattern. Both the American Psychiatric Association and the World Health Organization maintain diagnostic frameworks for the more chronic, clinically significant form of the phenomenon.