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An unresolved problem in analysis and in psychosomatic medicine is the nature of the interaction of body and mind: how can something immaterial (thoughts, memories, wishes) exert a physical effect? Physics and physiology necessitate the belief that bodily events must be caused by physical processes. Various unsatisfactory theories have been advanced: 'parallelism' which denies any causal relation between mental and bodily events; 'epiphenomenalism' in which bodily events causally influence mental ones but not vice versa; materialism in which mind is completely reduced to matter; the 'double-aspect and identity' theories, which are also unacceptable to the clinician. Only 'interactionism' appears to explain observed clinical data, but it presents the problem implicit in the principle of physical causation of physical effects. The term 'mental processes' of necessity includes the unconscious as well as the conscious. Gestalt psychology postulates a tie between an experience of perception and the underlying process in the brain, which can be explained in terms of recent neurophysiological findings that extensive electric fields are operative in the brain. Such fields possess a concrete unity, 'representational' of the conscious experience of perception. In similar fashion, ideas and memories perhaps possess a concrete unity expressed in an electrical field. It follows that 'mental processes are identical with certain physical field processes', and interaction of body and mind can thus resemble the other processes of physical nature. This theory has many implications for psychoanalytic metapsychology.