In this paper Marie Bonaparte attempts to redefine the territory and the boundaries of psychoanalysis because she feels that the upsurge of psychosomatic medicine threatens to blur the psychological understanding of problems of psychogenesis. She agrees that there are many physical manifestations of psychogenic conflicts but she maintains that there are areas where psychological factors play an unimportant or an inaccessible role.

Marie Bonaparte is of the opinion that there is a deeper unconscious, an organic unconscious, which presides over the vital bodily functions and which is inaccessible to the influences of the human mind. She fears that the crusade for psychosomatic medicine is in part a revival of the old spirit of magic and has once more stirred up one of man's most primitive desires—to believe in the supremacy of the soul over the body. In this way the psychoanalysts who stress psychosomatic medicine inadvertently play into the hands of people who seek to believe that omnipotence of thought assures them of their supremacy over the universe.