You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
How much general medicine should a psychoanalyst know? Unfortunately, this question has become a political football with extremists polarized into opposing camps: those claiming that medical knowledge is completely irrelevant to psychoanalysis and those maintaining that only medical doctors should be psychoanalysts.
Perhaps the question should be phrased differently. Is it at all useful for the psychoanalyst to have some familiarity with the biological functioning of the body and the ways such functioning can become deranged in some forms of illness? Expressed thusly, the issue might be rescued from territorial disputes among competing disciplines.
The thesis of this essay is that such knowledge can be valuable to the psychoanalyst in several ways. The most obvious one is in sensitizing the analyst to problems needing medical attention. The dread of every analyst medical and non-medical alike, is the “psychogenic” headache which turns out to be a brain tumor. On the other hand, it is impractical and often countertherapeutic to send a patient to a physician everytime the patient reports a new wrinkle on an old symptom.
Some sophistication in medical matters can also be useful to the psychoanalyst in communicating with a physician about a patient's coexisting illness. We are entering an era in physician-patient relationships in which medical information is coming to be