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The senior author, Dr. Jores, heads the Department of Internal Medicine at the Medical School of the University of Hamburg, Germany. He is also Director of the Medical Clinic and Polyclinic attached to the Medical School, where the second author works as a clinical psychologist. This book describes the etiology of, and therapy for, bronchial asthma from a psychological point of view.
Since attempts to cure bronchial asthma medically have not been successful, a new approach was initiated by the authors. A comprehensive survey of the literature on bronchial asthma (113 references) had revealed that people suffering from bronchial asthma were neurotically disturbed. The authors tried to determine whether people suffering from bronchial asthma had in common certain character traits which would separate them from other neurotics. They were aware of the psychoanalytic literature on bronchial asthma and of some of the dynamics which had been revealed. Yet, they felt that a physician, who is not a psychoanalyst, does not understand psychoanalytic nomenclature and therefore cannot apply psychoanalytic therapy. They also felt that the psychoanalytic literature reports only on a few cases at a time and therefore does not contain comparative data on a large scale. In an attempt to make available to a large medical audience relevant data which characterize the asthmatic and separate him from the large number of neurotically disturbed people, a very ambitious testing program, consisting of physiological procedures, questionnaires and projective methods, was inaugurated.
The testing population consisted of fifty persons suffering from bronchial asthma, fifty persons suffering from vegetative dystonia, and a control group of fifty people. These 150 persons all had average intelligence.