Psychosomatic medicine and the behavioral sciences.

1 HE CONTRIBUTIONS made by behavioral scientists to psychosomatic medicine have been exhaustively reviewed. Alexander reports from the viewpoint of the dynamic psychiatrist, Mirsky from the position of the experimenter, Grinker from the standpoint of the clinical researcher, and Wittkower and Cleghorn discuss the sociopsychological concomitants of various disease entities. Historical and theoretical reviews by Kaplan and Kaplan, Mendelson et ah, and Gitelson round out the picture. In order to avoid duplication, therefore, I shall approach the same subject from a more epistemological and methodological point of view. The mind-body and man-environment dichotomies of Western peoples are conceptual and linguistic devices which facilitate the study and control of nature. Guided by a materialistic philosophy and dedicated to technological progress, nineteenth century scientists believed that the abstractions that were used so successfully in the exploration of the physical universe also could be applied to the study of psychological and social events. Subsequent