I remember from when I was young (Fifties-Sixties) that in the "volksmond" (folk's mouth (popular speech?)) many psychosomatic illnesses were recognized and named as such in sayings and mostly people were very "vergoeilijkend" (glossing over?) as if they found it normal that in such circumstances the human mind reacted via such physical reactions.

I remember for instance when a serious event had a big impact on a person, people said:
(I have only sayings from East and West-Flemish (the Dutch dialects of the former County of Flanders))

"het is in zijn buik geslagen" (it has beaten on his belly?)
When a big event causes an immediate reaction of the bowels and one has to run to the next toilet...
I am for instance such a person...hence one says also: " 't is in zijn darms geslegen" (it has beaten his bowels?)

A bit the same with:
"het heeft zich op zijn maag gezet" (it has placed itself on his stomach?)

We had also the expression:
"het is in zijn hoofd geslagen" (it is beaten in his head?) or "'t is in zijn bol geslagen" ("ball" instead of "head"):
something moved him that much that since he has another behaviour"

From all this I don't find anything on the mighty "google", only:
one! entry about the last saying:
"het is in zijn hoofd geslagen"
Seemingly from a novel:
https://jozefrulof.org/online/download_pdf.php?pdf=nl_13_jeus_3.pdf
"De stad is in z'n hoofd geslagen" (the city has moved his head)
I guess (I will not read the whole novel): someone coming from the countryside, who is a bit disorientated in the new big city?

Is it so that one don't know this people's sayings anymore and runs to the psychologue or to the psycho-analyst to solve these quite "normal" problems...or have they nowadays some other "English" expressions for these phenomena?

My question, and perhaps this was better on the "language" board, have the Anglophone contributors or French ones, also such equivalent expressions in their languages? Or did these expressions as seemingly overhere only existed in the past? And did they apply for the same phenomena? And are there more such expressions for other psychosomatic illnesses?

Congratulations on using the term "psychosomatic" correctly. Most people incorrectly assume it to mean an illness with no physical cause brought about purely from "auto-suggestion" or "imagination" originating purely within the sufferer's, probably aberrational, mental state. Medically speaking however the physical cause is often well understood, with the mental states involved perfectly natural and understandable too, as well as the link between the two.

In nearly all of the cases you mentioned as examples the enteric nervous system, as well as the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems - all part of our autonomic nervous system - play a big role, either as direct causes of an immediate reaction or as sustained contributors to a delayed or prolonged reaction which will indeed alter a person's mood, how they rationalise events, and how they interpret their interaction with the physical world around them, sometimes even setting patterns that continue for the rest of their lives.

So it is quite understandable also that ordinary language, even if the chemical mechanics weren't fully understood, addressed the easily recognisable and identifiable symptoms and effects when these occurred. The associated effects ranged from aspects to our "fright and flight" programming to how our body behaves physiologically when its "mental computer" has to deal with conditions leading to prolonged periods of anxiety or stress. The further into the latter end of the scale one goes the less obvious sometimes any one original trigger becomes, so that is where one finds those expressions related more to the fugue state of mind typical in such instances rather than any overtly physical symptom.

The one from English that springs to mind, and which has an interesting etymology, is the phrase "down in the dumps", used to describe an otherwise hard to communicate mixture of feelings including depression, listlessness, ennui and general disassociation from the world around one. This is often accompanied by an almost tangible physical sensation - again in the "pit of the stomach" - which is of course the enteric system doing its stuff and which gives rise to everything from "butterflies" to involuntary evacuation of the bowels depending on the suddenness of the onset of anxiety that precedes it.

The image the phrase invokes of feeling oneself "sent to the garbage dump" or "on the rubbish heap of humanity" is appealing, but has no actual role in how the phrase came about. In fact it is a very ancient English expression, going right back to Saxon times and betraying the strong Friesian roots to the pre-Norman language. You will be familiar, Paul, with the Dutch "domp" which even today is used to mean a state of mental dullness or unease leading to slight depression. This in turn can be traced back to an older German "dumpf" which was basically a meteorological term describing "close", "oppressive", "gloomy" conditions such as one finds under heavy storm clouds while they gather above one, with the threat of thunder and lightning adding anxiety to the mix.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood "dump" to mean a particular slow, mournful dirge or musical piece associated especially with communal mourning and funerals, and while they avoided the "down" bit they certainly used "in the dumps" to figuratively conjure an image of being immersed in such an environment, with the slightly happier connotation that by definition the state was temporary. Mourning, and certainly funerals, always have an end in sight. But nothing to do with garbage whatsoever.

Thank you very much nordmann for your reaction on these questions. And what a reaction...I am used already to many aspects of your in depth knowledge, but now I have to doubt if you weren't in some time of your life also involved in neurology. In any case I had to search for the explanation of some terms and I am nearly sure that other readers will have to do it also...
And thanks in any case for explaining this difficult relation between brain and body in laymen's terms.

And we have to admit perhaps that "popular wisdom" can't be always the guide, as many times "real" science contradicts that popular sayings, but at least it is the accumulated "experience" from generations, and as such can contribute in my opinion to better understanding of phenomena of psychosomatic reactions. The same, also in my opinion, about phenomena in links of other areas of the physical world.

As you know nordmann it is especially on this forum that I learned so much in the nearly last ten years about etymologies in mostly Dutch, English, French languages. And as such I thank you also for another example of compared etymology.

I learned from your reply, kind regards, Paul.

Paul R. wrote:

Thank you very much nordmann for your reaction on these questions. And what a reaction...I am used already to many aspects of your in depth knowledge, but now I have to doubt if you weren't in some time of your life also involved in neurology.

Mmm. I agree with everything nordmann has posted above, Paul, but perhaps we should not confer Consultant Neurologist status on him just yet ! For anyone interested in this fascinating subject, two books I have found immensely useful and enlightening are: The Body Never Lies by the brilliant Alice Miller, and When the Body Says No: the Cost of Hidden Stress by the excellent Hungarian-Canadian doctor, Gabor Maté - he, a qualified doctor with vast experience in that fertile field of human misery, addiction, is well worth reading (and watching on YouTube - he is not a psychobabbler).

But perhaps this is straying off topic and it is the relevance to language only that interests you and nordmann. One never knows these days of posting confusion. I wanted to look at the idea of miracles being closely bound up with the relief of emotionally-linked physical illness, even physical disability present from birth after a difficult and/or unhappy pregnancy. Damage, physical and emotional, can be inflicted on the unborn: the mental state of the woman before giving birth is terribly important. And trauma, again emotional or physical,  is now known to affect the laying down of important neural pathways in babies' brains. Whether such damage can ever be rectified is something I'm delving into at the moment. I just wish I was more of a scientific bent - some of the language is baffling, but more and more doctors are recognising - admitting -  there may be more to mumbo jumbo than mere mumbo jumbo. Neglect and lack of love, even in a child born into affluence and privilege, inflict wounds that can last a lifetime - and destroy the potential not just for a happy life, but for a useful and productive one.

Quote :

But perhaps this is straying off topic and it is the relevance to language only that interests you and nordmann. One never knows these days of posting confusion.

 
No, no Temperance, not the relevance to language...at least for me...
But yes the relevance of these short popular sayings among people that really summarizes the links between stress situations and physical reactions of the human body (and perhaps in animals too?). I worked in a big factory with a couple of thousand people and knew perhaps some 400 of them during all kind of situations...and learned a lot about psychosomatic reactions...

But back to this subject: I was already struck by the relevance and the worth of these sayings from childhood on.
For instance: here they say: "de haren ten berge doen rijzen van schrik" (they translate: "make the hairs stay to end"?)

And I saw it once! in my life:
In the class room...I guess boys of 16/17 years old...we on a schoolbank per two...conincidentally my neighbour and I on the first bank...the guy on the bank behind, and as I was attentive that he was preparing something, made a gesture to not alert my neighbour...and it seemed to be a dead mouse that he intended to do something with...
Inserting the cold dead mouse into the open pullover of my neighbour on his bare skin of his back...
He feeling with  his hand on his back what it was...he had some short cut hair but nevertheless brushed backwards...
And I have seen that hair slightly rising when he felt with his hand that cold mouse (not knowing what it was) on his back...
Instantly...if that is not a psychosomatic reaction?...

Temperance I am also interested in the rest of your message, but that will be for tomorrow...
Kind regards, Paul.

Psychosomatic cures, as opposed to illnesses, are much more complex a subject. It is certainly true that mental stimulus has a direct chemical consequence in many instances, and if the former can be artificially manipulated then it is certainly true that the latter can be equally artificially induced, with sometimes impressive predictability too.

However the complexity arises when this approach is taken to misdiagnosed, undiagnosed, or even "phantom" illnesses, the latter being that category of illnesses where symptoms themselves are difficult to understand causally or in terms of what they signify, or are simply not visible at all but are presented by the patient as real nevertheless. These are the categories of illness that are indeed often referred to incorrectly as "psychosomatic" in vernacular speech, react unpredictably or even not at all to standard clinical remedies, but also the ones that have been clinically demonstrated often to respond best to psychosomatic "cures" too.

Which is why one has to be very cautious indeed before using the word "miracle" when discussing instances of remission in any illness. The word is used to describe a huge range of circumstances, the only common features of which being that the remission was unlikely or not readily explicable clinically based on what was known about the malady as it applied to the patient or, in quite a lot of cases, simply not understood by the patient themselves so reported as miraculous nevertheless. When religion gets involved, in whichever form such a plethora of cultural customs, methods, beliefs and styles of intervention might deliver in any instance, there is a common tendency for the religious believer to give credit for any apparent cure to an equally religious source, especially when the exact clinical circumstances are poorly understood, and declare them to be "miracles". From a medical point of view this cultural tendency is extremely unhelpful - especially when within the scope that it presents lies the very real possibility on occasion that an effective psychosomatic cure has been delivered, but one which is almost impossible to separate from the intentional noise obfuscating the process (a rather common religious trait) and even the many instances of fraudulent claim which religion also throws into the mix.

Given the complexity of this field of remedial application therefore, with the added complexity religious interpretation adds to the field, it is not surprising that every culture, and consequently every language, will have generated over time many more colloquial expressions to describe this process when it applies to psychosomatic cures than they tend to have come up with for descriptions of such perceived illnesses or their symptoms. In modern society much has been done to mitigate any potential danger to patients whose colloquial interpretations of "cure", "healing", "treatment", "therapy" and other clinically concise expressions may sometimes interfere with actual effective treatment being applied, and certainly when the patient might have been convinced to pursue a "miracle" at the expense of their own health, but it is still a huge challenge in certain societies.

In the meantime there is certainly a field of study addressing remedies claimed by the religious as "beyond" clinical understanding, and the studies of most worth are those which, despite the background noise that makes this pursuit a challenge, attempt to isolate clinical explanations for the process. If understood they can then be applied for the greater good, and no physician of any merit would wilfully obstruct that study.

Thank you nordmann for another interesting reply. And in the meantime is it in my opinion also an answer to what Temperance alluded to I think. In any case it was a bit in that sense that I wanted this evening to answer to her about religion. But yours is much better and indeed with the emphasis on the "cure" it can be done perhaps by any method.
And if that medicine man or that local parochial priest can induce a cure with whatever suggestion it is as you say worth to be studied by academici to seek for the underlying methods.
On several occasions I was struck to what change in behaviour of a personality, suggestion, not to say hypnose, could bring a person.
Kind regards to both, Paul.

nordmann wrote:

The one from English that springs to mind, and which has an interesting etymology, is the phrase "down in the dumps", used to describe an otherwise hard to communicate mixture of feelings including depression, listlessness, ennui and general disassociation from the world around one. This is often accompanied by an almost tangible physical sensation - again in the "pit of the stomach" - which is of course the enteric system doing its stuff and which gives rise to everything from "butterflies" to involuntary evacuation of the bowels depending on the suddenness of the onset of anxiety that precedes it.

The image the phrase invokes of feeling oneself "sent to the garbage dump" or "on the rubbish heap of humanity" is appealing, but has no actual role in how the phrase came about. In fact it is a very ancient English expression, going right back to Saxon times and betraying the strong Friesian roots to the pre-Norman language.

The term ‘pins and needles’ would also have been very old I thought, although in print in only seems to date from about 200 years ago. No doubt it is much older in the spoken language.

There are 2 main causes of the phenomenon of pins and needles. The first cause is primarily physical and is based on poor circulation. For instance, someone waking up with a ‘dead arm’ and with ‘pins and needles’ in the hand, is likely to have slept on that arm thus inhibiting blood flow. This phenomenon is peculiar in that it seems to afflict both those who are unfit (i.e. with poor circulation to start with) and those who are super-fit (i.e. with excellent circulation) in equal measure. Those in between (i.e. the moderately fit) seem to be less affected by pins and needles. It’s believed that in the case of the super-fit, the act of sleeping on one’s arm does not prompt a shifting of position in the sleeper because the brain (which might otherwise subconsciously demand such a shift) is in a deeper state of sleep precisely because of the sleeper’s higher level of fitness. The neurology is still unclear on this. 

The second cause is more complex. This can manifest itself in a sense of pins and needles or restlessness or unease in the legs. A condition which is associated with high blood pressure and which can often be brought on by social anxiety or other stressors in life. It is also closely associated with the aforementioned concept of having ‘butterflies’. The comparison ends there, though, as butterflies in young lovers etc (while sharing the same nervous connections) is generally a harmless condition. Pins and needles in the legs of an older person, however, is a sign of hypertension. In this way pins and needles in the legs can be also considered to be a psychosomatic illness.

Perhaps a similar, somewhat ill-defined condition, is the almost uniquely French ailment 'jambes lourdes' (heavy legs). This denotes an unpleasant sensation of pain and heaviness in the lower limbs or that they feel itchy, prickly, tingly or numb, together with a general feeling of fatigue or stiffness. It is widely recognised and diagnosed by health professionals in France and numerous medicaments are sold to treat it. Strangely though, it is largely unrecognised outside of France although aspects of it are certainly taken as symptoms of regular medical conditions such as hypertension. That is not to suggest that the French are a nation of hypochondriacs although due to the excellent national health service many medicines, whether obtained over-the-counter or by prescription, are inexpensive or even free (at point of sale; tax and compulsory national insurance contributions are high). In this regard, for a few years now remedies to treat 'heavy legs' are no longer covered by French health insurance companies and consequently consumption of these products is now one-tenth what it used to be.  



In a related vein (pun intended) I went to the local pharmacy on Friday to get some flea spray (for the dog, not me) and while there noticed the pharmacist is now authorised to give Covid vaccinations. I have been eligible for vaccination for about two months now but had thought I'd need to go down to the main vaccination centre about 40mins drive away, and, since I've hardly seen another human being for over six months, it hadn't been a matter of urgency. But now with bookings finally rolling in for July and August, I felt I ought to get it done. In the pharmacy I asked to make an appointment and she replied that if I'd got my medical card with me, she could do it then and there. I had, so she did. I've had no adverse reaction except a general feeling of listlessness and, yes, heavy limbs (which might well be simply due to the hot, thundery weather). Nevertheless perhaps I should have bought one of the remedies for jambes lourdes while I was there.