Conversion

The expression of an intrapsychic conflict as something physical. In the world of medicine, this pathologic effect has been seen in the form of blindness, deafness, or some other catastrophic physical manifestation of someone’s inner conflict or anxiety. You may know it in a more mundane way as “being too sick to go to school,” or in having had someone genuinely fall ill with a cold or flu at just the wrong time. For example, right before your wedding.

While it would be outright lying for someone to say that they are too sick to go out with you tonight, it is a similar kind of thinking to attribute to the physical, that which is problematic about the psychological. Be on guard when you hear the phrase, “I’m too sick to...” When someone “flakes” repetitively on promises made to you and then attributes them to a physical reason, there is a hint of this defense going on.

Say that in our typical diagram of a defense mechanism that the reptilian brain, unconscious, or id, depending on what you want to call it, is overloaded with impulsiveness, and is threatening to unleash that passion and drama into the conscious psyche (or even to explode out into the social environment outside the personal boundary.) If there are not other, more mature ego defenses operating (the Ego Boundary and possibly the Personal Boundary are too weak), then one remaining avenue for the passionate energy to be redirected away from creating chaos in the conscious psyche (or social environment outside), is into the body itself, which the reptilian brain, or instincts directly connect to and in some cases, operate. This is theoretically one way that a person may develop physical, psychosomatic symptoms without being consciously aware of their origin.