The Chronic Headache Patient

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Abstract
The author of this preliminary study on psychosomatic chronic headache and migraine has based his research on 3 principles: (1) It is necessary to form a control group; (2) it is useful to withdraw from consideration the patients whom we have known only through a few interviews in order to limit the case material to patients who have been in psychotherapy for at least several months; (3) specificity must be expressed in terms of levels: there are in particular 3 levels on which one can consider some specific causes of psychosomatic diseases. The research led to the following conclusions: (1) Often chronic headache and migraines are due to repressed aggression – specificity on the 3rd level; (2) the heart infarction may occur under a specific psycho-social circumstance – specificity of the 3rd level: an important failure or a smarting loss which suddenly strikes the patient in his basic personal, familial or professional ambitions; (3) the hypertension patients present a particular type of personality – specificity on the 2nd level-characterized by constant hurry, psychic tension, hyperactivity and hyperemotivity; (4) the multiple analogies between the patients suffering from migraines, hypertension, cardial infarction, ischemic strokes, asthma, obsessional neurosis, etc. are explicable by the interaction of very many psychological variables. In fact, the analogies between the various etiological patterns do not seem to conflict with the theories of specificity, yet they illustrate the necessity of a multifactorial approach. Maybe computers can help us with further research in this field.

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