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I am grateful to Dr Redfearn for his comments, which gave me the opportunity to reconsider and clarify my thoughts. As regards his request for a control series, although to begin with I too made every effort to find a suitable control group among my patients with the intention of including it in my presentation, I am quite convinced that this would not have increased the scientific value of my statement. In fact, my opinion is that in our field of

study the use of control groups, as that of statistics, easily leads to a pseudoscience. As Kadinsky (1963) pointed out, the language of depth-psychology rarely attains the level of abstraction required of scientific terms. Precise approaches to research are hard to come by unless one uses different methods, as Kadinsky successfully did when he used psychological tests.

The difficulties which beset the psychopathological description of a disease by way of an ulcer—or asthma—‘type’ are apparently as varied as is the etiology of such diseases which can hardly be determined in their entirety. It depends on the observer's viewpoint to which of the different causative factors he allots most weight, from which angle he looks at the disease. It is therefore not surprising that such apparently contradictory statements as mother-fixation or hatred of the father could be emphasized in accordance with the observer's bias.

There is a straightforward experience known to many analysts: notwithstanding individual differences in the classifications of symptoms or complexes, it is possible to recognize similarities in the constellation of conflicts and also in the therapeutic processes. I am convinced that we can, to say the least, find comparable psychopathologies in the same clinical syndrome. But difficulties do of course arise when we ask whether a psychosomatic disease could also produce physiologically different processes which nevertheless result in the same symptomatology, e.g. symptoms referable to the heart. Thus Zander (1970) di