Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative LiteratureThis interdisciplinary study examines the enigmatic category of psychosomatic disorders as articulated in medical writings and represented in literary works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Six key works are analyzed: Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, Arthur Miller's Broken Glass, Brian O'Doherty's The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P., and Pat Barker's Regeneration. Each is a case study in detection as the hidden sources of bodily ills are uncovered in intra- or interpersonal conflicts such as guilt, family tensions, and marital discord. The book fosters a better understanding of these puzzling disorders by revealing how they function simultaneously as masks and as manifestations of inner suffering. |
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Alexander Barbour behavior biopsychosocial model blindness bodily brain Broken Glass Buddenbrooks characters Chillingworth chological chosomatic Christian clinical conflicts context conversion disorder Craiglockhart death diagnosis Dimmesdale Dimmesdale’s disease disturbances dream DSM-III DSM-IV emotional environment etiology experience eyes factors father feelings Freud function Gellburgs Glover Hanno’s heart Hester humoral medicine Hyman Hysteria idioms of distress illness instance Lipowski literary patients Man’s manifest Marie-Therese marriage means mental Mesmer metaphoric mind and body mind-body mother Mysterious Leap narratology narrator nerves nervous ness neurasthenia neurosis novel organic pain person Phillip physical symptoms physician physiological play problem psyche psychiatry psychoanalysis psychological psychosomatic disorders Psychosomatic Medicine PTSD Puritan readers Regeneration repression response Rivers Rivers’s role Sassoon Scarlet Letter secret sexual shell shock silence social somatic disorders somatoform disorders speak Strange stress Sylvia Sylvia’s paralysis talk Thérèse and Laurent Thérèse Raquin Thomas Thomas’s tion trauma Tuke unconscious word Zola Zola’s