by Lawrence Gold

The first step of growth is release from the grip and gravity of old memories, old feelings, old sensations embodied in the physical self.

Sigmund Freud has come into and gone out of favor over the decades, but his seminal contributions to human understanding, which began with his observations of the interrelation of mind and body, are acquiring new relevance. "Hysteria" was the diagnosis he gave to a woman whose physical symptoms (paralysis) stemmed from repressed emotional disturbance. "Somatization" is now the more general term used to indicate physical manifestations of fixated (stuck and unconscious) emotional states. What makes Freud's contribution particularly interesting is that he did not start out as a psychologist and discover a physiological expression of mind; rather, he started but as a physiologist and discovered the correlation of physiological functioning and psychological state. His first interest was the physical body, and only after investigation did he discover that a person's physical functioning had a psychological correlate.

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