Quelques Aspects Psychosomatiques du Glaucome

Abstract

The influence of emotional factors in glaucoma has received wide recognition by clinicians and investigators. Referring to a more particular dynamic approach of three female patients, the authors want to ascertain if certain personalities, influenced by their education and milieu, faced with profound conflicts considered insoluble, would not in their choice of somatizations choose the eye, referring to its subjective symbolic value as an object of auto-punitive paroxysm, so reflecting the summum of their introjected culpability and aggressive drives. In each case the patients experienced a feeble or absent father's figure, a frigid and authoritarian mother and problems of identification. They no longer could tolerate their passivity in the life situations and developed a competitive attitude. Born in a lower, middle social class, they all obtained a university degree. Then a great deal of altruism has crowned their dominating needs. During the acute phase of glaucoma, they showed an overflow of aggressivity and culpability with feeling of hopelessness. The acute and profound personality disorganization was perceived by the patients themselves more intensely than those experienced in some other psychosomatic complaints.