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This is a serious book on an important subject. Written by two psychologists who are obviously skilled in their specialty, using standard techniques in testing and in statistical methodology, it assays an ingenious idea of promising plausibility, and by its own lights comes up with a full confirmation. Unfortunately its medical and psychoanalytic naïveté turn it into an object lesson in the practice of pseudo science.
The authors felt that sufferers from stiffness of rheumatoid arthritis would, under psychological testing, show a body image with strong outlines. The second part of their hypothesis was that normal people with strong body-image outlines would be apt to get 'surface diseases' like arthritis and neurodermatitis, rather than internal and visceral diseases; while normal people with fuzzy body-image outlines would get internal diseases, even to the location of cancers.
As to the first part of their hypothesis, the choice of rheumatoid arthritis burdened the authors unnecessarily with vagueness; it is not a disease, but a syndrome of obscure mesodermal disposition and affecting many organ systems, both interior and surface. Stiffness in rheumatoid arthritis is already evidence of the third order, preceded by periarticular, then by intermittently spastic signs. Would early, prestiffness victims show a strong body-image outline? Would the test subjects continue to show strong body-image outlines during remission? Would the authors test the fact of stiffness itself? Or would they test victims of related pathology, such as rheumatic fever, osteoarthritis, gout, etc.?
None of these courses was followed. Instead, a comparison is made with some accident victims who complain of back pain. The relevance of this comparison and the significance of its importance are rationalized. Thus, like many other psychologists, parapsychologists, and educators who learned to use statistical techniques, the authors seem not to have the mathematics and the logic to choose a