Psychosomatic Medicine 23:277-286 (1961)
© 1961 American Psychosomatic Society

Psychosomatic Medicine and the Behavioral Sciences

¹ Department of Psychiatry, University of California School of Medicine, and The Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, San Francisco, Calif.

Psychosomatic medicine is not a subject that can be scientifically delineated. Instead, the field is determined by the attitude of physicians who wish to consider physical disease in the light of the behavior of the patient.

The correlation of behavior with physiological and pathological findings has revealed few if any causal connections, and the prediction of disease in the light of certain behavior has not been too successful. Instead, a host of transactions have been discovered that link disease to emotions in an as yet nonspecified way.

While established facts are few in psychosomatic medicine, there is a multitude of theoretical notions that are designed to bridge the gaps in our knowledge; but most of these concepts beg the question of the mediating mechanisms that transform inner experience into bodily pathology and vice versa.

The contributions of behavioral scientists to psychosomatic medicine have consisted of clarifying the methodology used in the study of human behavior, identifying the potentially or actually harmful situations, and specifying some of the deleterious human interactions and ways of communication.

What is needed are focused rather than general, small-scale rather than largescale, and well-controlled Sstudies of the mediating mechanisms that link psychosocial events with changes in the bodily tissues.