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Professor Christie and Dr Mellett have compiled a vast amount of material embodying the results of numerous studies on the subject of 'contemporary' psychosomatic disease. Even with the greatest objectivity, this remains a speculative field, some would say arbitrary, but nonetheless is the best discipline there is in evaluating psychological, physical and social factors in the evolution of disease processes. The contributors include clinical practitioners and research workers in psychology and medicine, and the book attempts to present material useful for a multidisciplinary readership.
It is divided into sections: the first an Introduction, then 'Earliest aspects', 'Emotion', 'Individual differences' and 'Environmental influences'. The approaches are from the foundation sciences relevant to psychosomatics, and to a lesser extent, from clinical practice. The resulting essays do succeed, in this reviewer's opinion, in presenting an up-to-date overview of the subject, though with more than 30 contributors, some sketchiness in the totality is inevitable. Perhaps the field presented is too pervasive, though which topics to leave out must have been a problem to the Editors: surely not the excellent Review of the history of the subject by Professor Christie herself, nor the account of 'Psychophysiology and drugs in anxiety and phobias' by Sartory & Lader.
For the psychoanalyst-clinician, mention must be made of 'Intra-uterine experience and its long-term outcome' by Barrett, and 'Individual differences in the first week of life' by Mills. The first, especially, will excite analysts who support the contention that almost no period is too early for observation of a viable ego, and it is a fact that it is becoming accepted and acceptable to move further and further back in the life-span of the individual when attempting to understand later phenomena.
For psychoanalysts, another chapter with possible relevance is that by Dixon on 'Psychosomatic disorders: a special case