The Behavior of the Stomach During Psychoanalysis—A Contribution to a Method of Verifying Psychoanalytic Data

Psychosomatic medicine, in the view of some critics, is another area for the application of psychoanalytic psychology, in that somatic processes in health and disease are always accompanied by a psychic component of varying intensity (1). The boundary at which psychoanalysis can be described as entering into an applied phase with respect to medicine is often obscure, especially in the light of the hypothetical biological basis of the instinct and libido theories. Perhaps a useful distinction between applied and nonapplied psychoanalysis arises from the answer to the pragmatic question as to whether the given investigation contributes more to psychoanalysis than to a non-psychoanalytic field within the arts and the natural and social sciences.

It has been said with some justification that no scientific discipline has contributed to the verification of psychoanalytic data and to the validation of its theory since Freud found it necessary to abandon biology and to venture into psychology. Although this departure was expediently determined by the limitations of the biology of his time, Freud never relinquished the monistic conception that the mental life of man was a