Psychosomatics vol. 4 – Pancreas – what does the body tell us?
The pancreas is also part of the digestive system, and it primarily has two functions: the exocrine part produces essential digestive juices, whose activity is clearly aggressive. The endocrine part of the pancreas, the islet cells, produces insulin. Insufficient productivity of these cells leads to an expanded picture of diabetes (diabetes). Originally, this disease was also called sugar dysentery, or sugar diarrhea. If we recall the previously presented food symbolism, the word sugar diarrhea can be freely translated as love diarrhea. Due to a lack of insulin, a diabetic cannot assimilate the sugar he has taken in with food — the sugar flows through him and he excretes it again with his urine.
If we replace the word sugar with the word love, we have accurately outlined the problem area of diabetics. Sweet things are a substitute for other sweet desires, which make life sweet. Behind the desire of a diabetic to enjoy sweet things and the simultaneous inability to assimilate sugar and take it into his own cells, there is an unrecognized desire for love fulfillment, coupled with the inability to accept love and let it completely into himself. A diabetic must live on “substitute food” — a substitute for his real desires. Diabetes leads to coma through excessive acidification of the entire body. We know this acid as a symbol of aggression. We always encounter this polarity of love and aggression, sugar and acid (mythologically: Venus and Mars).
The body therefore teaches us: he who does not love will sour, or to be completely unambiguous: he who does not know how to enjoy, will soon not be able to be the object of enjoyment himself! Only he who can receive love can give it – a diabetic excretes love in the form of unassimilated sugar in the urine. He who does not let go enough will let sugar pass through his body. A diabetic wants love (sweet things), but does not dare to actively realize this area (. . . I really cannot have anything sweet!). But he still longs for it (. . . I would so love to, but I cannot) – but he cannot get it, because he has not learned how to give love – and so love pours through him: he must excrete the sugar unassimilated. And let someone not be sour!
According to Rudiger Dahlke's book - Illness as a Path
*Key words: pancreas, Diseases of the digestive tract, Digestive tract, illness as a path, psychosomatics, gestalt psychotherapy, somatic experiencing therapy, psychotherapist Zagreb
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