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The pioneering work of Franz Alexander, Thomas French, and their colleagues in Chicago, in applying Freudian concepts to medical problems in which emotional components played a significant role, contributed to the growth and development of psychoanalysis in the United States. It resulted in a greater interest and acceptance of psychoanalysis by the American community and, as Leslie Farber has recently noted, “it was probably this development that assured Freudianism the supremacy it now rapidly began to assume in America” (1977, p. 386). However, “This supremacy was neither achieved nor maintained … without vigorous challenge” (Farber, 1977, p. 386). Since our focus is not on the development of psychoanalysis since the early 1930's, I will refrain from pursuing this line of thinking any further, except to underline the important and significant historic role of the Chicago Institute's research on psychosomatic medicine for psychiatry as well as for psychoanalysis.
Personally, it was the excitement, challenge, and research potential of this new field that steered me into psychiatry and psychoanalysis and away from neurophysiology. But now I am returning to my earlier research interests in mind-brain and body and hope to undertake new investigations on what I believe to be once