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“Bodily and psychic processes, as expressions of life, are interwoven in their function. They are also in interaction with the surrounding nature and social contexts. Health is regarded as balance, and disease as imbalance in this interrelated psychosomatic unity”, writes Lerner in the preface of this book which is a revised and enlarged version of her previously published book on the same theme: Psychosomatics. A psychological perspective (1987). To be able to think body and mind together and be capable of grasping the physical and the psychological dimensions at one and the same time as declared above, is every psychosomatician's dream. This is especially true if he or she is psychoanalytically oriented, which is often the case, the very use of the expression “psychosomatics” suggesting a dynamic approach to the question of health and disease. Authors who investigate these topics from other perspectives, for example, “health psychology” or “medical psychology”, generally avoid the term psychosomatic, and use another terminology.
The title of the present book, Psychosomatics: the dialogue between body and soul, thus evokes associations to psychodynamic theories, and has the declared goal of maintaining an interactional approach which reflects the complexity of the field. The other aim of the book, according to the author, has been to integrate the results from the growing biological and neurophysiological research with her own clinical experiences. It is difficult to communicate so much knowledge and so complicated interactions in the format of an easily accessible book which aims at the same time at being an intelligible presentation for the common practitioner in medicine