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The tendency to use psychological terms as curse words shows a surprising tenacity. For decades, the term "neurosis" was a primary category of psychological diagnosis. In more recent years, however, this term has been largely abandoned. The reason for this was that terms like "neurosis" and "neurotic" had become pejoratives. We came to refer to people that we didn't like as "neurotic," as a means of dismissing the importance or validity of what they were saying.

In a valiant effort to remove these biases, diagnosticians abandoned terms like neurosis and neurotic, and sought instead to create a more neutral set of terms. For example, one new term was "dysfunction." Unfortunately, this effort failed. Now when we want to curse at somebody, we call them "dysfunctional," a term now preferred by many when making derogatory comments.

The same problem occurred with the term "psychosomatic." Originally, it was intended to mean disorders that have both mental (psyche) and physical (soma) components, Unfortunately, it too fell victim to the vulgarization of psychological diagnostic terms. For the average person, psychosomatic means that it is your physical problems are not real, but are rather "all in your head." The psychosomatic person is regarded by many as a neurotic person with ridiculous symptoms who needs to stop acting so crazy and leave the doctors alone. Because of this prejudice, the term "psychosomatic" has fallen into disfavor, and now words like "somatization" and "somatoform" are preferred. These words were initially less value-laden, as nobody knew what they meant. However, as they began to enter our vocabulary, they too have begun to take on negative connotations. As with other psychological diagnostic terms, initially they were technical diagnoses, but eventually they evolved into curse words.

Somatization is one of the oldest of all known psychological diagnoses. The first reference to this kind of phenomena appears about 1900 B.C. in Egyptian documents, and it was also commented upon by the Greeks. In its modern form, it was first defined by Briquet in France in 1859.

As we understand it today, somatization is a phenomena where a person becomes somatically preoccupied. Typically, there are underlying feelings of depression, anxiety or other feelings, which are not recognized or acknowledged by the person. Instead, what the person may be aware of is all the physical correlates of these underlying difficulties. Thus, for example, a somatizer may not recognize that he or she is depressed, but instead may report fatigue. A somatizer may not recognize that he or she is anxious, but may instead report that his or her hands have become tremulous, or that there is a chronic tightness in the back of the neck.

The tendency is to blame the somatizer for the misreport of the symptoms. But in fact, our society fosters somatization. (дальше)

-- Daniel Bruns, "The Problem of Somatization"

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