This article reflects on the working methods and results of the EPF Working Party on Psychosomatics from the author's personal perspective. Through the lens of the sociology of professions, this paper examines a group of analysts, heterogeneous in terms of nationality and school affiliation, in their joint search for truth. It examines the basic patterns of interpretation that vied with one other in the psychoanalytic casework of psychosomatic patients. Using a case intensively discussed by the group, this paper works out how the inner conflict between a correspondence theory of knowledge and a coherence theory of action came to a head in the interpretation of physical symptoms, and how this conflict between epistemic truth versus clinical truth is reflected in treatment technique. The second part attempts to understand Freud's position on this problem using his late work Constructions in Analysis, which is then applied to current inner-analytical discourse.

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