A psychosomatic illness is one in which a bodily ailment is, at least in part, attributable to emotional factors. The role of anxiety and its emotional derivatives is a key concept of psychosomatic medicine and clinical studies have shown the temporal relation between the course of a patient's disease and the emotional vicissitudes of his life. In psychosomatic illnesses, the anxiety associated with a stressful situation is generally unconscious, but the physical repercussions of the emotion occur just the same.