On Freedom and Induction

Traumatizing events and traumatizing conflicts may lead to defense mechanisms which in the course of time become part of character formation. In psychosomatic medicine much attention has been paid in the past to the so-called psychosomatic character profiles. Though discussions about psychosomatic specificity have remained controversial, it still seems advisable to take into account the power of induction of specific defense strategies. In this paper special attention is paid to the fact that asthmatics, patients suffering from hypertension or coronary heart disease, as well as patients suffering from other psychosomatic syndromes, and even patients suffering from carcinoma may induce their own defense strategies in interviewers and therapists, who usually are not sufficiently aware of the fact of such transference phenomena. A distortion of the normal psychotherapeutic process is more often a result of induction processes than has been thought of.