| Title | : | Psychosomatic Concepts |
|---|---|---|
| Author | : | Roy Richard Grinker |
| Release | : | 1984-06-30 |
| Kind | : | ebook |
| Genre | : | Psychology, Books, Health, Mind & Body |
| Size | : | 1576053 |
| WITHIN little more than a decade, the term psychosomatic medicine has become an integral part of the vocabularies of most physicians and many informed laymen. Psychosomatic concepts have infiltrated with varying degrees of accuracy into contemporary intellectual discussions. As a diagnostic approach, a therapeutic attitude, or an etiological concept of disease, the psychosomatic or comprehensive view of mans ills has fired the imaginations of countless physicians and stimulated the curiosity of many research workers in this country. The American Psychosomatic Society has developed a forum for scientific discussions and organized an outstanding professional journal. Both of these have rapidly become important to American medicine since 1939. The rapid acceptance of psychosomatic concepts was partly the consequence of World War II, during which the somatic effects of excessive anxiety were clearly demonstrated to millions of men under stress and to their medical attendants. However, the public and many of its physicians had already arrived at a stage of sophistication and need which supplied fertile soil for the first assumptions of psychogenesis of bodily disturbances and for the tentative correlations between some emotional conflicts and some somatic diseases. Little as we may now wish to preserve the word psychosomatic, which calls attention to, rather than denying, mind-body dichotomy, wide usage forces us to preserve it as a symbol of contemporary concepts pertaining to transactions among psychological and somatic systems. After World War II, many physicians sought training within a hypothetical specialty of psychosomatic medicine, unaware that psychosomatic means a conceptual approach to relationships, not new physiological or psychological theories or new therapeutic approaches to illness. Enthusiasm for the creation of a new specialty, widespread loose application of superficial psychological interpretations, and formulations of exclusively emotional etiology for somatic disturbances were serious complications of wide and premature dissemination of tentative hypotheses. Uncontrolled conclusions based on incomplete studies of only a few examples of specific syndromes were applied to all cases. The enthusiastic quest for knowledge by a plethora of postwar graduate students seduced their gratified teachers into throwing caution to the winds, into stirring up even more interest among physicians, and into making doubtful therapeutic promises to laymen through popular lectures and articles of questionable accuracy. All this had a devitalizing effect on the scientific aspects of psychosomatic medicine. |
