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this volume reports the proceedings of the conference held by the Society for Psychosomatic Research which convened in London in 1961. All the participants were British except two who came from
The Netherlands. If this conference is representative, it is notable for the little experimental work which is being pursued abroad and the extent to which psychoanalysts rely mainly on clinical impressions.
Van der Valk, for example, briefly presents Clusters of Illnesses and Syndrome Shifts as Observed in clinical Practice. The paper is more valuable for the interesting questions it raises than the data it provides. Bastiaans considers The Place of Personality Traits in Specific Syndromes: Cause or Effect?. Included is a table presenting differentiations among personality types associated with ulcerative colitis, peptic ulcer, essential hypertension, and bronchial asthma. These personality types are largely descriptive and do not adequately incorporate psychodynamic factors. The means of dealing with aggression is given a large role in the genesis of symptoms. Wolff, addressing himself to the question, Why Do Emotional Conflicts Express Themselves in Physical Symptoms?, comes to the conclusion that 'when repressed fantasies and instinctual impulses are prevented from finding sufficient psychological expression … they are likely to be expressed instead … through the language of the body in the form of a psychosomatic illness'. In effect Wolff extends the concept of conversion although he acknowledges that constitutional and other factors may play a role in the genesis of the disorder. His view, in general, seems to be one of direct psychogenesis. Hambling proposes that in psychosomatic disorders guilt and anxiety, stemming from infantile sexual fantasies and from precocious sexual experience, play little role. He regards the important influences to be 'the realities of … emotional deprivation or coercion' leading to what are fundamentally biological responses.
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