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Psychosomatic Medicine and Contemporary Psychoanalysis is actually two books with an important integrating summary. In Part I, Taylor carefully and skillfully reviews the historical underpinnings, the evaluation of concepts, and the current status of psychosomatic medicine in three concise, well-referenced and scholarly chapters: "The Classical Era of Psychosomatic Medicine," "Stressful Life Events and a General Susceptibility to Disease," and "Emotional Expressiveness and the Psychosomatic Process." The author describes the historical origins of alexithymia, the concept, its definition, and its measurement (including critical details about the scales that are currently employed in its assessment). This is an important chapter not only because of the clarity with which the concept of alexithymia is presented, but because it shows how such a "thought disorder" meshed with early psychosomatic theory, becoming a springboard for Taylor's development of a new conceptualization of the etiology of psychosomatic disorders and treatment approaches. He stresses that the intervention with patients who have alexithymia (and psychosomatic illness) is to confront the communication defect, develop affective tolerance, and increase awareness of the unconscious, but avoid the usual analytic schema that tries to elucidate conflict.
Part II describes "Mind-Body Relations in Early Life" with two contributions: "A Revised View of the Mother-Infant Relationship," and "The Transitional Object and disorders of Regulation." The author emphasizes the concept of "psychic organizers," "the mother-infant relationship as a regulatory system," and places special significance on the "hidden regulatory processes in the mother-infant relationship" described by M. A. Hofer's painstaking research using animal models: regulatory systems of heart rate, sleep-wake states, growth, thermo-regulation, and the effects of vestibular stimulation, and their relation to development and attachment. From t