[Being a body and having a body--background of dualism in medicine]

Psychosomatic medicine coincides with the detection that the medical crisis is a philosophical one as medicine prescribes single-track empirical models and concepts. To overcome this dualism of soul-less bodies and body-less souls is of utmost importance in order to gain an idea reflecting man and his body in the reality of their firsthood experiences, secondhood acts and treatments. In the realm of this reality we treat our bodies according to the reactions on warning signals of everyday life. Only if our secondhood possibilities fail we have to see a doctor. Thus it is the patient who gives the treatment order and nobody else. He delegates his secondhood possibilities to the physician. And the physician has to build up a communication enabling the construction of a mutual reality in which it becomes possible to reach the firsthood requirements of the patient via empathy. The medical crisis as a sign of the transition from industrial to communication society requires from us to transfer the idea of a body which can be interpreted and manipulated technically into an idea of the body as an open information system the basis of which is the relation among patient, physician and disturbance or in short: the patient-physician relationship. In the realm of this relationship the reality of medicine is emerging. Physician therefore are called upon to defend the inseparable basis of their profession against expanding bureaucratisation and against marketing tendencies of health companies.