Psychosomatics: the Interaction of Soul and Body

The general practitioner does not find an organic cause for the complaints of more than 20 percent of all patients – often the actual disease triggers can be found when taking a closer look at the individual psychological and social factors.

What is meant by psychosomatics?

Psychosomatics is the study of diseases that manifest themselves physically while being partially or wholly psychologically caused.

The psychosomatic understanding assumes that body and soul influence each other, and sees the human being as a biopsychosocial unit whose individual components can only function together. This holistic basic idea is present in many areas of medicine – thus every family doctor follows it when he not only asks his patient about his current complaints, but also wants to know more about his patient’s family or work and asks him if he is otherwise doing quite well. However, the importance of the psychosomatic idea has not always been the same in the last centuries.

Historical emergence of psychosomatics

The physician in antiquity and the Middle Ages always treated both body and soul at the same time in order to provide his sick patient with the most comprehensive care possible. His conception of illness was influenced by the theory of temperaments, which assumed that bodily fluids and mental state were closely linked.

Only scientific research in medicine from the 16th century onward changed this view. Disease was defined as a chemical-physical change in the body’s cells that could be treated with drugs. To this day, however, this natural-scientific medicine runs into some difficulty in explaining diseases in which no changes in organ function can be detected.

From the end of the 19th century, psychosomatics emerged as a medical countercurrent. Its aim was to shed more light on the individually different influences and courses of disease and thus improve the treatment of ailments that could not be treated sufficiently by natural science. Important pioneers of today’s psychosomatic findings were Sigmund Freud and Franz Alexander, and later explanatory models by Hans Selye and Thore von Uexküll, among others, were added.

How does psychosomatics make itself felt in everyday life?

The connection between the psyche and the body can be experienced by each of us every day in our own bodies – whether it is that “something is heavy in the stomach“, “the fright goes into the limbs”, you “almost pee your pants with fear” or that you blush with shame and your heartbeat accelerates in an unpleasant situation. These experiences show that emotions can affect and impair both autonomic bodily functions such as heartbeat, blood pressure or bladder and bowel activity, as well as the musculoskeletal system with its muscles.

The interplay between the psyche, behavior, and the nervous and immune systems has now been studied for almost 30 years by a special psychosomatic research field, psychoneuroimmunology (PNI). It has already discovered a variety of links between the different areas, without usually being able to say in detail exactly how the interaction is triggered. Some transmission pathways, however, have already been well researched; for example, chronic stress has a negative effect on the various cells of the immune system.