[Methodologic aspects of the body-mind problem in psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy]

Adequate research strategies in Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy require a variety of different epistemological approaches. This paper emphasizes to replace the dichotomy between nomological explanation of physical processes versus intentional understanding of psychological phenomena by a combination of the discrimination between psyche and soma and the discrimination between causal explanation and intentional understanding. As a result there are four categories of research: scientific research in biological objects, nomological research in psychological phenomena, ideographic and qualitative research in psychological phenomena, and holistic-systemic research in biological phenomena. The relationship of research results from one of these paradigms to results from another paradigm will be discussed at the end of the article.