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The improvement of a patient's physical health in the course of treatment is one of the most impressive outcomes of psychoanalytic therapy for both the clinician and the patient. Charles Hogan is not only an experienced psychoanalytic psychosomaticist but also a teacher, supervisor, and author with forty years of experience with patients with inflammatory bowel disease. Particularly gratifying is his conviction of the utility of psychoanalytic thinking and clinical work in the treatment of these very serious and even fatal conditions.
The first section of the book consists of a description of the medical aspects of inflammatory bowel disease. Hogan emphasizes how much resistance there is to accepting the existence of a psychological and environmental ideology to them, despite the fact that the medical approach of medication and surgery is fraught with limitations in effectiveness, complications, and relapses, all of which add to the toll on the patient's life experience.
Next, Hogan undertakes a discussion of a variety of theoretical issues. This is the most difficult part of the book, consisting of an exploration of the theoretical basis of such complex terms as psyche, soma, causality, parallelism, isomorphism, linguistic parallelism, and interactionism. To his credit, Hogan uses a direct and clear style: “I have great reservations about the words functional and organic with their implied definitional restrictions as well as their implied etiological significance” (p. 76). In this way he deals swiftly and deftly with a longstanding academic problem. Functional has long implied a change in function without permanent tissue changes, whereas organic has meant organ damage itself. It is now known that no such clear-cut distinction can be made.
In explaining parallelism, he states that it is the theory that events in the mind and in bodily organs occur simultaneously but are not causally related. Thus, by extension, linguistic parallelism indicates that the verbal means t