Rumors on Tumors

Reviews the book, Psychosomatic Aspects of Neoplastic Disease edited by D. M. Kissen and L. L. LeShan (1964). The purpose of this volume is to draw attention to the much neglected psychological approach to the understanding of cancer; to permit the integration of some of the findings of the vaiied approaches and to provide a general picture of much of the current research that proceeds in this field. As is the inevitable case regularly noted by reviewers of other compilations, the quality of the contributed papers is highly variable. Many of the contributions included in this book share a number of the defects that characterize a great deal of the psychological and psychiatric literature dealing with cancer. Some of the more frequently observed in this set of papers are: first, psychological characteristics (such as depression) found among persons already ill with cancer are given causative significance when they are much more parsimoniously viewed as either concommitants or reactions to a complex set of systemic changes; second, there is an unacceptably unsophisticated tendency to translate directly from the psychological to the physiological level, exemplified by the implication or statement that disease processes are purposively motivated behaviors of the organism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)