The Psychological Profile of the Patient with Primary Hyperhidrosis

Abstract

Dichotomizing the mind and body is to disregard the emotional subject’s subjective representation and its unconscious processes. Trauma can be characterized as an excess of emotion that triggers disease, as an explosion in the body, with a wordless discharge function in response to a primitive, non-verbal conflict, causing a “short circuit” in the person’s psychic workings. In this way, part of the body expresses what is prevented from being said. In patients with hyperhidrosis there is a fault in the channel of psychic expression, but messages continue to gush in an abrupt, primitive, disorganized, or organized way according to unknown rules, and the only form of expression is the body’s transpiration. These patients are considered to be psychosomatic, with emotional changes that require psychological evaluation and psychotherapy before any surgical procedure.