As the culture changes its mind about what is legitimate disease and what is not, the pattern of psychosomatic illness changes.

In other words; illnesses brought on by stress will present differing symptoms depending on what is medically plausible at the time.

'Shaping' and the 'symptom pool'

It is a fact of medical practice that what patients think they have is important and that ‘shaping’ occurs in a very particular way. Indeed, psychosomatic symptoms do not manifest randomly, but rather are chosen from a pre-determined 'set menu'.

This set menu of symptoms – the symptom pool – from which the subconscious mind will draw, is simply a list of symptoms which have all been validated by the contemporary society. They mirror symptoms of contemporary organic diseases for legitimacy and so as society and diagnostic thinking and techniques change, so too do the symptoms displayed by psychosomatic patients.

As incredible as it may seem then, your subconscious mind is capable of selecting certain symptoms for your body to display based on what is currently in vogue. Shorter describes it thus;

The unconscious, not wishing to make itself ridiculous, brings itself medically up to date.

For example; for a long time in the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries motor symptoms, primarily in the form of paralysis, or conversely, hysteric fits, were the most frequently seen in somatisizing patients.

Chronic fatigue, although present in the symptom pool since ancient times, started to become an important symptom only later in the 19th Century.

The paradigm shift described above - from motor symptoms (paralysis) to sensory symptoms (fatigue) - was due to the increasing sophistication of medical and diagnostic techniques in the early 20th century. As a result patients presenting themselves to medical practitioners;

abandoned classic hysteria … and adopted sensory symptoms that would correspond to the new medical paradigms of central nervous disease and psychogenesis.

As the new illness paradigm asserted itself prior to WWI, the old Central European clinics established to cater for ‘nervous hysteric’ patients were suddenly filled by sufferers of chronic fatigue, whilst in the U.S. fatigue joined the symptom pool in the 1870s and was prominent until the epidemic of recent decades.

Conclusion

In reference to Morgellons, the history of symptoms suggests that a psychosomatic origin of a complaint is just as likely as an organic one.

That the subconscious will select symptoms that mimic organic diseases obviously consolidates the patients’ belief in the organacity of ailments and combined with the lack of understanding about the nature of psychosomatic illness results in a strong conviction that illness must be caused by something other than the mind.

This, of course, may not be true.