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.
The authors attempt to show how the theory of 'psychosomatic' illness can clarify our understanding of certain relationships in
disease. They discuss basic concepts and diagnosis, describe specific syndromes, and outline methods of therapy. Seventy-nine cases are presented, not to give understanding of somatic processes, but in order to 'demonstrate how psychiatric concepts and methods add to the understanding and management of illness'. These illustrative cases provide valuable suggestions for securing illuminating histories. Some of the techniques of treatment should be valuable both to beginners and to more experienced therapists. But this is more than a mere 'case book'.
Dr. Grinker has repeatedly sought to make psychosomatic theory more scientific and scholarly. He has long recognized how unreliable, unscientific, and muddled are the 'profile studies' of many students. He and Dr. Robbins apply to psychosomatic science the 'field theory', a dynamic scheme for the study of organization of parts and wholes. This organization, although constantly in the process of change, has a stability in its 'part-whole relationships'. 'The psychosomatic field becomes, according to the theory, a continuum in which there is a tendency through transactions to maintain equilibrium, orderliness or a steady state.' The field theory offers a well-integrated picture of intrapsychic events, in refreshing contrast to classical analytic concepts which represent intrapsychic events as if they were isolated occurrences. The field theory pictures all the factors influencing the organism as continuously in operation, rather than as delimited and mutually exclusive forces.
The authors' concept of disease seems to the reviewer to resemble the thinking in Adolf Meyer's psychobiology. Meyer never fully accepted the dynamic unconscious of psychoanalytic theory; but fortunately he also could not accept the theory that man is beset by isolated conflicts, such as the conflict between life