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Of all the sciences, it is without doubt psycho-analysis which offers the best means of observing in the human being the constant interactions between mental and bodily events. To the analyst such interactions are a matter of everyday clinical experience, and his detailed findings concerning them are basic not only to psycho-analysis itself but also to the closely allied field of psychosomatic medicine. Yet one of the unsolved problems common to both fields is that of body-mind interaction as such, since the very concept of such interaction appears to conflict with the principle that the causes of any given physical event are themselves exclusively physical, and therefore that nothing which is defined as non-physical can in any way intrude into the closed circle of natural causation so as to exert a physical effect.
In might, of course, be claimed that this principle of the closed circle of physical causation has been clearly invalidated by just those above-mentioned clinical observations of body-mind interaction, and in general by the whole current psychosomatic revolution in medicine. But this would actually entail that in each of the vast number of these apparent body-mind interactions (and in every voluntary action, for that matter) something non-physical intervenes somewhere among the atoms and nerve-currents in the body and makes them do what they would not have done otherwise. And physicists and physiologists could not admit such a possibility, since as scientists they proceed on the assumption that any given bodily event could be explained completely in terms of other bodily events provided they knew enough about them.1 The principle of the closed circle of physical causation (with its corollary of the conservation of mass-energy) thus remains a necessary working assumption, and even those clinicians to whom the effects of mental events on bodily ones are undeniable facts are not inclined to question a principle so fundamental to natural science as this,