Abstract
AFTER the First World War it was generally agreed that symptoms such as paralysis, tremors and morbid anxiety might be the expression of mental experiences rather than the result of ultra-microscopic lesions in the central nervous system, but a sharp line was drawn between the organic and the psychogenic. For most of us the psychogenic was something that could, if necessary, be consciously simulated. This clear-cut idea was challenged in 1935 when Flanders Dunbar collected a wealth of data suggesting that physical disease might be initiated or at any rate accelerated by emotional events. The idea was not new. It is, and always has been, the belief of lay people, and a generation ago it was expressed and practised with conviction by the physician Groddeck. The hostility of the majority of the medical profession to the acceptance of psy chological interpretations of organic disease is not because this is a new idea, but because it is a very old one, and because the advance of medicine since the time of Hippocrates has been largely due to a prejudice against the belief that disease could be explained by demoniac possession, emotional experiences or mental influences.
Emotions and Bodily Changes
A Survey of Literature on Psychosomatic Interrelationships, 1910–1945 By Dr. Flanders Dunbar. Third edition. Pp. lix + 604. (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1946.) 50s. net.
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WITTS, L. Emotions and Bodily Changes. Nature 158, 252 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158252a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158252a0