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I first approached this book out of a personal rather than a professional interest, since as a psychotherapist I have never considered myself as specializing in ‘psychosomatic’ problems. Rather instead I have been exploring over the years the psychological and emotional dimensions of mainly behavioural problems. However, this book has made me re-think much of my professional as well as personal experience. Addressed as it is to a wider audience than that of psychotherapy, it nevertheless utilizes the knowledge that we perhaps take for granted and delves deeper into its implications.
The book is full of clinical anecdotes as well as fully documented research, some of it well established, and some much more recent. Much of the research goes to show the complex link between mind and body and that the psyche is crucial to the correct diagnosis and understanding of physical ailments. At the risk of oversimplifying the varied information contained in the book, I would like to pick one very basic connection the authors point to, which is the significance of change. The authors quote many studies that repeatedly show how important life events precede major illnesses and disorders. The list of such findings goes on and on, so that more than any other predisposing factor it ‘… is change that predicts illness’ (p. 60). But it is precisely these life changes and their emotional impact that are ignored in conventional medical practice.
The authors seek to attack certain fundamental assumptions that exist in conventional medical thinking. The ‘scientific’ approach seeks to isolate a specific cause, and to locate that cause of illness as an external influence on the body. This is referred to as the ‘infection model’, i.e. that a certain bacteria (or the equivalent) is responsible for the illness and its symptoms. The starting point of many of their observations is the limited perspective that any diagnostician such as a GP might have in hearing about and understanding an illness. It