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The study of Psychosomatic Medicine has made a comeback after several decades of unproductive hiatus. A number of psychoanalysts, mainly outside the United States, have studied, clinically and theoretically, the interaction of psyche and soma. Dunbar, Alexander, Schmale, and Engel gave an impetus for further research; however, the clinical results with patients suffering from medical illnesses did not live up to the promise of the theoretical paradigms. Lefer (2006) remarked, “of course our non-psychiatric colleagues in medicine view many of these hypotheses and theories with some skepticism. Is it simplistic? Cause and effect etiologies have been difficult to prove in the paradigm of evidence-based medicine. Despite the excellence of the contributions of these researchers at the time, their work has lost immediacy in contemporary psychiatry—a matter we recognize with regret.”
Reading this volume sponsored by the International Psychoanalytic Association does away with this “regret.” Psychoanalysis is alive and well in other countries. A collection of authors from Argentina, France, England, Brazil, Canada, and one from the United States, have revitalized the study of psychoanalysis as a clinical vehicle to understand and treat the mind acting on the body, reversing Freud's concept of the drives, the body acting on the mind. Mind and body appear as a parallel to light being sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle.
How to get attuned to the body through the language of psychoanalysis? The editors state, “All somatic illness is thus seen as having a symbolic value and may be treated by psychoanalysis.