[A few reflections of a clinician on the language of the somatic symptoms].

This paper presents a series of reflections upon the clinician's activity. His duty begins by having to understand what the words uttered by the patient mean and by assigning a clinical value to somatic symptoms. While the former of these tasks means that the patient must be followed in his particular way of self-diagnosis of his somatic perceptions and in his particular way of inventing his physical reality, the latter is rather easier and it's based on the use of a preformed model of the localization, intensity, duration, sequence and normal interpretation of the symptoms.