Psychosomatic Medicine from the Jungian Point of View1

I understand the invitation to give a paper on this subject as implying that a survey is not required. A survey must rather be presupposed if we are to investigate what the specifically Jungian point of view has to contribute or what new questions it may perhaps raise. The latter approach is indeed the more fruitful one when we are engaged in research.

With this end in mind, I wish to pursue two questions: (1) the origin of the psychosomatic idea in Jung, which in a sense is a historical question; and (2) the connection between the cure of somatic illness by means of psychological processes and the phenomenon of synchronicity.

To take the first question: when we think today of Jung's complex psychology, psychosomatic medicine will not, as a rule, be the first association that occurs to us. At any rate, when I told one of my non-psychiatric colleagues, who is well versed in Jungian literature, that the Jungians seemed to take an interest in psychosomatic medicine and that I therefore had to read this paper, he said: “You are upsetting everything for me!” This was followed by a second, rather malicious remark: “In that case it would really be better to let the laymen speak right away.” As we are used to taking spontaneous utterances seriously from the psychological point of view, I considered what deeper reasons these statements might have, and came to the following conclusion. The first remark is likely to have four roots: (a) the priority of the psyche in Jung; (b) in so far as the psyche is the most real thing, somatic disturbances must be understood as secondary symptoms; and (c) in so far as one practises psychology, the object of inquiry is the psyche, not the soma, i.e. the connections with the soma are secondary; (d) because of (a), it does not follow from the Jungian point of view that the psychosomatic fashion is a reaction against medical materialism.

At the back of the second utterance, I suppose, lies the conviction that