Psychogen

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Something whose cause lies in the mind or emotions rather than in any physical disorder or external agent
2. A mental or emotional source of an illness or symptom, as opposed to one arising from the body alone
3. An origin of a disorder or reaction that is rooted in psychological processes instead of physical factors

Etymology: Psychogen is a technical coinage, not an ancient word. It is built from two Greek elements: "psykhē", meaning soul, mind or breath, and "-gen", from "gignesthai", to be born or produced. Combined, the sense is "originating in the mind," used of physical symptoms or conditions that have a psychological rather than organic cause. Its use in English dates to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when psychiatry and psychoanalysis were developing their vocabulary, and it belongs with coinages such as "psychosomatic" and "psychogenic" that were built from the same classical building blocks. Nobody in antiquity would have recognised the word, though the Greek elements were available to scientists who wanted a precise label for disorders they believed had no bodily source. The suffix "-gen" also appears in many other scientific terms, such as "antigen" and "pathogen," where it means something that produces or gives rise to the thing named.