The authors describe the continuing resistance of clinical medicine to hermeneutic psychosomatics, a situation which they compare to a one-party system. Current medical education keeps its graduates blind to the symbolic content of organic symptoms and to the unconscious of their patients. The self-cure of this professional deformation is a precondition for the development of treatment strategies that would benefit the majority of the psychosomatically ill. By means of case history sketches, the authors demonstrate the significance of the model of biphasic defense in the genesis of psychosomatic illness (Mitscherlich) and the theory of the 'basic fault' (Balint) for the further development of hermeneutic psychosomatics.