Psychoanalysis and the Autonomic Nervous System: A Bioanalytic Approach to the Problem of the Psychogenesis of Somatic Change

Ever since Claude Bernard's classic work (8), the problem of the human organism's adaptation to its environment has constituted a nuclear principle around which the various data of human biology were assembled and integrated. Since the turn of the century, two great scientists, Walter B. Cannon and Sigmund Freud, have provided us with observations and theories of the greatest importance in relation to this problem.

Cannon's chief objects of study were experimental animals, primarily higher mammals. He studied the reaction of the animals to various changes in their external environment. A great quantity of careful experimental observations was thus accumulated and this formed the basis for later theoretical constructions.

Freud, in contrast to Cannon, made his observations on human beings. Moreover, although Freud was well aware of the interaction between organism and external world, some of his most important work concerned itself with observations of the reactions (adaptations)