With this publication I want to begin a series of articles on the topic of psychosomatics, and more specifically, suffocating patients. The articles are based on a report given at the conference “The Body in Psychoanalysis”, held at the Eastern European Institute of Psychoanalysis on February 1, 2020. People are brought into psychoanalysis for very different reasons. And the analyst’s choice is, of course, determined by unconscious processes, often not obvious to both the patient and the analyst. Thus, some analysts often see patients who react to psychological problems with their bodies. These are psychosomatic patients, patients with panic attacks, patients with conversion symptoms. Therefore, I think the issues of conversions and psychosomatics will be of interest not only to users of the site, but also to many of my colleagues. People who are suffocating not only scare themselves, but also scare those around them. A person can live without air for only a short time; breathing problems go hand in hand with the fear of death. The reasons that make people suffocate are very different. I want to try to tie possible clinical cases to theory and show how difficult it is to systematize analysands who come to therapy with such problems. I will introduce a little theory. But as will be clear later, it will not help us)) Today we associate with the concepts of psychosomatics and psychosomatic medicine many different meanings and areas of research, which are heterogeneous and not consistent with each other in the formulation of problems and research methods. At the same time, the problem of psychosomatics from the very beginning was the central problem of psychoanalysis, which arose through the study of the psychosomatic aspect of the organic symptoms of hysteria and fear neurosis. Psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychiatrists involved in psychosomatics divide symptoms in different ways. Even among psychoanalysts, the attitude towards psychosomatic medicine today is not unambiguous. If we divide all the bodily symptoms with which patients come to us into two groups, then we usually separate conversion symptoms and psychosomatic diseases. The study of conversion symptoms began with the study of the behavior of hysterics, and how and Freud writes about this term in 1894: “With hysteria, an idea that is intolerable to the patient is neutralized by translating the growing excitation into somatic processes, for which I would like to propose the term conversion.” To put it simply, in the case of conversion symptoms, our patient has a certain idea that was once realized and repressed. The situation that arises in reality clings to the once repressed idea, and in the patient’s fantasy it is extremely dangerous. To avoid a situation that seems dangerous to the patient, symptoms arise. Symptoms are thus the expression in “body language” of specific unconscious fantasies that have arisen as a compromise in conflicts between anxiety-provoking drives and defenses against these drives. Conversion symptoms may represent muteness , deafness, problems with walking, hiccups, vomiting, pain in various parts of the body, paralysis, as well as breathing problems. So, Freud’s classic example: a woman’s hand is taken away as a protection against masturbation. At the same time, damage to the nerve endings could not give such symptoms, since the nerve endings are distributed differently. The choice of symptom (including the affected organ or area of ​​​​the body) is an excellent example of the “return of the repressed” - both the drive and the defense against it are reactivated. A part of the body is selected that is symbolically associated with the repressed idea, and this expresses masochistic punishment for partial satisfaction of the forbidden fantasy. It can be said that Freud’s concept of conversions, in a certain sense, became the prototype of the concept of neurotic repression in general, and modern views on conversions came from the concepts of classical psychoanalysis and not strongly from them +7-953-148-29-97