The Feeling Body and Its Diseases: How Cancer Went Psychosomatic in Twentieth-Century German

This essay examines how psychosomatic medicine, as it emerged between 1920 and 1960, introduced new ideas about the emotional body and the emotional self. Focusing on cancer, a shift can be mapped over the course of the twentieth century. While cancer was regarded at the beginning of the century as the organic disease par excellence, traceable to malignant cells and thus not caused or influenced by emotions, in later decades it would come to be thoroughly investigated within the field of psychosomatic medicine. This essay illuminates why and how this shift occurred in Germany and how it was affected by the earlier turn toward a psychosomatic understanding of cancer in the United States.