Review of PSYCHOSOMATIC DIAGNOSIS

Reviews the book, Psychosomatic Diagnosis by Flanders Dunbar (see record 1944-02434-000). In this book author describes illness as a “dispute between the patient and his disease.” Considered in that light doctors have been witnessing the “disputes” that have been going on for years without there ever being any settlement. Costly? Of course, but it has been considered inevitable and many physicians are willing today to accept the inevitability of prolonged disease symptoms in the individual patient. Many investigators in medical research rest the problem there. Others, like Dr. Dunbar, not content with the purely physiological approach, have attempted to correlate the somatic make-up of the individual with a personality character in respect to the symptom formation of the disease entity. The contribution of psychoanalysis to the understanding of emotional conflict as an activating agent in the production of disease syndromes, afforded a point of departure in tracing the subtle winding and crisscrossing of the disease processes mixed up with the frustrations, repressions, inhibitions, and aggressions of social, familial, economic and individual deviations. Dr. Dunbar and her co-workers are to be commended in laying such a fundamentally sound foundation on which the structure of future psychosomatic diagnosis may be erected. It is for medical educators of the future to direct increasing research toward the interplay between the physical and the psychological components of the sick individual. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)