["Body psychosis": an interpretative hypothesis about some psychiatric disorders].

Abstract

The authors propose to group some clinical entities as Delusional hypochondria, Dysmorphophobia, Nervous Anorexia, under the term of Body Psychosis. These are considered as psychoses endowed in the body (naturally we are speaking not about the anatomical body, but the phenomenological one, the personal experienced body). The specific clinical frame is justified by the following considerations: 1) in a psychopathological light all the disorders imply an altered relationship with the personal experienced body; 2) in a prognostic light the "experienced body" involvement given specific and common features; 3) clinically a one-other manifestation change is always possible; 4) relationally the human contact (and the medical one too) with this kind of patient got very specific features that often provoke dramatic and perverse changes in the same relation, especially in a sadomasochistic sense. The personal nosological frame is stressed within the actual psychiatric diagnostic classification (ICD 10, DSM IV).