[Psychosomatics--a balancing enterprise?]

The present article supports the opinion of the main difficulty in psychosomatics being both in theory and in practice the consequent enforcement of our working hypothesis concerning the unity of body and soul against our spontaneous conception of the psyche as an immaterial entity. Furthermore, based upon the physiology of affects, an attempt is made at procuring a concept of the "psycho-somatic" unity with the aid of "exact imagination". As a further step the physical processes triggered by stress factors, i.e. the so-called stress together with the ensuing stress syndromes, are described. In analogy, the physical correlates of neurotic conflicts of ambivalence may be described as strain and the resulting disorders as strain syndromes. Finally, experimental findings confirming the above theories are presented.