[The significance of psychology in medicine]

It is shown in a retrospective review how the specific political climate twenty years ago helped to establish psychosomatics, psychotherapy and medical psychology as disciplines in their own right. The "reform-minded" trend gave psychotherapy recognition as a treatment method to be acknowledged as cost-refundable under the Federal German health insurance system. Furthermore, it prompted the Federal German government to start an inquiry into the present situation of psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine, whereas research workers at the base developed models of psychosocial working teams and of a renewal of sociopsychiatry. Meanwhile the political "turnabout" in the Federal Republic from a socioliberal to a predominantly conservative line has produced a conservative countercurrent: the medical institutions undergo reinstatement of ancient hierarchies, jobs in the psychosocial sphere are being dramatically axed, psychosomatics is being streamlined as an adapted auxiliary discipline ruled with an iron hand by a dramatically expanding clinical pathology or laboratory medicine and by a concept of "health" that is purely functional. Basing on the case history of a woman suffering from psychogenic sterility the author critically discusses the gap-clearly noticeable although frequently denied-now dividing the individual disciplines and schools of psychological medicine, separating in each case a preferably conformistic branch from a critically engaged one.