Before undertaking psychotherapeutic treatment whose goal is to resolve psychosomatic disorders it is recommendable for the patient to have received medical attention to manage the physical suffering, and to confirm that it is, indeed, a psychosomatic illness.

Psychosomatic disorders are bodily expressions of emotional suffering that has not been able to be worked through mentally, and thus discharges in the soma, often in the form of auto-immune illnesses. Psychotherapy’s task in the case of psychosomatic illness is to understand what aspects of the patient’s emotional life are being deposited in the body, and, through this understanding, to bring them back to the terrain of thought so that they no longer have to manifest themselves somatically. Once the patient and the therapist have managed to think about what is occurring, it can be worked through and resolved as in classical psychotherapy.