Psychosomatic Medicine

Benjamin, John D. Directions and Problems in Psychiatric Research.

Wikler, Abraham. A Critical Analysis of Some Current Concepts in Psychiatry.

Holmes, Thomas H. And Wolff, Harold G. Life Situations, Emotions, and Backache.

Persky, Harold; Gamm, Stanford R. and Grinker, Roy R. Correlation Between Fluctuation of Free Anxiety and Quantity of Hippuric Acid Excretion.

Levy, Ruth J. The Rorschach Pattern in Neurodermatitis.

Ingvarsson, G. Psychoneurosis and Raynaud's Disease.

Weiss, Joseph. Mucous Colitis.

Benjamin, John D. Directions and Problems in Psychiatric Research. Psychiatric research, as defined in practice, includes investigations in such diverse fields as clinical symptomatology, psychodynamics, personality theory, psychoanalysis, learning theory, child development, group dynamics, perception theory, sociology, cultural anthropology, genetics, psychosomatic medicine, and with it general medicine, psychotherapy, biochemistry, general and psycho-physiology, neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, and psychological testing. Knowledge of individual psychological functioning must be incomplete without consideration of its relationship to group functioning, that our famous “person as a whole” must also be studied as a “person as a part.” For our immediate purposes and those of medicine in general we can best define etiology in terms of necessary conditions, rather than of single causes or causal chains. In other words, etiologically we are interested in differences in events, in variables, and not in invariant conditions. One cannot, at the present stage of psychiatry, afford to dispense with causative thinking in general, nor with the concept of genesis on different levels of organization. On the contrary, lack of such thinking, and the refusal on philosophic grounds to make inadequate but useful distinctions has retarded and confused much psychiatric research of the past years. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the field of research in psychosomatic medici