Etiology of psychosomatic symptoms remains unclear, in spite of many studies by similar sciences. I present the hypothesis that the patient needs to have an autistic personality as predisposition, i.e., he needs to have autistic barriers - attachment to "autistic forms" and to "autistic objects" - in response to a fetal or postpartum trauma that produces a feeling of physical discontinuity. These forms and objects are elements of the body itself, such as saliva, fingers, tongue, and hands in contact with its own sensory surfaces, especially the skin. The sum of these registers by incipient or developing implicit memory works as a biological ego without a cognitively interpreting subject. The patient with an autistic personality withdraws to the autistic homeostatic state when there is a trauma with an instinctive notion of death, as if he already knew the way and remains in suspension there. Thus, the body becomes a "good enough mother," as quoted by Winnicott. Psychosomatic symptoms are a representation of biological defenses, and not a representative of conflicts based on repressed sexual or destructive elements. It includes death anxiety, of no longer existing. Psychosomatic symptoms paradoxically hide a fight to live and especially to the patient's psychic survival, according to MacDougall.
Psychosomatic symptom; autistic personality; trauma; sensory perception