[Introduction to psychosomatic medicine (author's transl)]

Psychosomatic medicine is a "holistic" conception of pluricausal medicine which has as an objective to study not the isolated disease, but the sick man, that is the humanised patient in his most complete nosological and ecological perspective. Numerous arguments seem to indicate the reality of clinical and experimental links between emotional life, psychic troubles and the dysfunctioning of organs or the apparition of visceral lesions. Anatomical and physiological studies play a capital role at the level of the hypothalamus, limbic system and at different neuroendocrinological systems (pituitary, corticoadrenal and medulloadrenal). On the experimental level, beside confining ulcers obtained by different technics on the laboratory rat, one must insist on the experiments of Weiss who showed that the peptic ulcers of the rat, under certain conditions, depend on two variables: the number of stimuli which the animal must face and the informative feedbacks more or less useful, which it receives in return. The investigations undertaken on the sick man show the importance of functional troubles with respect to anomalies of the autonomic nervous system or anomalies of intramural ganglions, which explain perhaps the notion of target organs for the troubles. Considering the most recent concepts which valorise the role of genetic factors in the determination of psychosomatic diseases, one can conceive that psychological determinants, affective or environmental, are cofactors which integrate themselves with somatic, genetic, constitutional and nutritional factors to produce the final morbid picture.