Were not the eye to sun akin.
How could we e’er the light behold?.
Filled not a God’s strength us within.
How could the divine hold us enthralled?.
GOETHE: Farbenlehre
(Introduction).
Independently of each other, medicine and psychology have accumulated a considerable amount of information in their particular fields. Much less progress has been made, on the other hand, towards an understanding of how these two fields could be systematically correlated. The diagnosis of a disorder as psychological difficulties might have very “real” organic disease; that psychological difficulties might have very “real” physical manifestations is seldom considered seriously. Thus the general trend of medical thought is still strictly dualistic; psychic and somatic happenings are treated as mutually exclusive rather than inclusive.
Even where there is an inclination to look for a oneness in the dual expressions there is no understanding, as yet, as to where and at what level a synthesis can be found and how one could advance from general philosophical speculations to a really scientific method. A truly scientific method must be able to explain the correlation of specific physio-pathologic and psychologic facts in each given instance; in addition it must enable us to predict facts and connections not yet actually discovered. Instead of this we have only empty words of psychosomatic or psychophysical parallelism which utterly fail to render any specific help or information when put to the practical test.
In attempting to formulate the modest beginnings of such a theory, the bare experimental and clinical evidence, so far known, is made the starting point for finding the basic laws into which those facts can be fitted.
In doing so, we must be award, however, that the mode of thinking which is applicable to mechanic and inorganic functioning is not in the same way adequate to do full justice to the expressions of life. Life evolves not, as it were, in straight progressions but has a peculiar, often apparently self contradictory forward and backward motion of polar oppositions, complementary expressions and circles. It requires a flexible synthetic thinking to se the determining unit which step by step finds its manifestation in these cyclic rhythms.
The experiment of homoeopathic provings shows that whenever medicinal substances are taken by provers until symptoms appear, those symptoms always are psychical as well as physiological and are absolutely, specifically characteristic for each individual drug used in the proving.
This fact of the absolute qualitative specificity and individual character of the mental symptoms, giving what almost amounts to a personality aspect to so many drugs, seems to speak against the assumption that those mental symptoms are merely the result of a primary disturbance of the physical functioning.
Moreover, the mental symptoms not infrequently are expressed in an inverse ratio of prominence as compared to the physical symptoms and often precede them in time and order of pathological development. Therefore it appears more correct to state that a uniform biologic stimulus (the individual drug) produces a specific response, simultaneously, on the psychoemotional as well as on the biological level.
For a better evaluation of this phenomenon we might compare it with a relatively simple analogous one, the discharge of atmospheric electricity which produces lightning and thunder. Although lightning and thunder are experienced as differing isolated phenomena of light and sound, their difference lies only
in the form of manifestation of an identical process (electric discharge) which they bring to our experience. We usually do not perceive lightning and thunder as simultaneous and often may even observe only the one to the exclusion of the other. However, since we understand the processual, qualitative correlation of lightning and thunder we do not question the basic identity of their underlying force process.
Similarly, in our experimental proving we perceive two different manifestations (psychic and physical symptoms) resulting from one stimulus (drug); in analogy to lightning and thunder they may be observed simultaneously or in a timely sequence. At times one type of expression may be so feeble as to escape notice so that we observe only the physical or only the mental phenomenon on superficial examination. But never is the characteristic qualitative pattern changed which is typical of the given drug.
Thus we are justified in the conclusion that the two responses, the organic and the psychical, to the one specific stimulus must be functionally identical, though in the mode of their manifestation they certainly do differ.
Clinical experience seems to bear out our assumption. We know that mental and physical symptoms are largely interchangeable. Emotional suppression leads to physical disorder; physical suppression (e.g. menses, lochia etc.) may produce hysterical and even psychotic states. In psychiatry even the term “conversion” state is used to denote somatic manifestations of mental or emotional disturbances. In this psychoanalytic work, Reich has shown that the dissolution of certain muscular inhibitions and tensions often leads to the spontaneous dissolution of characterological inhibitions.
The characterological shift is attended by vegetative symptoms like trembling and jerking of muscles, itching, gooseflesh, sensations of hot and cold etc. Reich concludes that “all these somatic symptoms are not the result, nor the causes or the accompaniment of the psychic processes” but that “they are these processes themselves in the somatic sphere”. Upon careful observation every mental disorder reveals definite characteristic organic symptoms, even as every patient with an organic illness has his characteristic mental symptoms.
Thus the actual instances of clinical disorders fit into the concept of the fundamental identity of the processes which present themselves in a dual manifestation in the psychic and somatic spheres.
So far, our hypothesis has rested on the experiment which was based upon the introduction of a third factor, the drug. The proving experiments have shown that under proper experimental conditions any and every existing substance of mineral, plant or animal origin is able to call forth a qualitatively specific biologic response in a human prover. From the drug originates the stimulus that calls forth the ambivalent response which is always qualitatively specific for each substance. Consequently this “medicinal” substance itself, though it is a part of the non-human realm, must obviously partake of the force pattern, namely, the specific psychophysical disturbance, which it sets into motion.
On the other hand, the actual instances of emotional or physical disorders differ from our experiment in not ensuing, as a rule, from a drug stimulus. Yet, even spontaneous illness is linked to a specific exogenous drug pattern, inasmuch as for every case of illness a drug pattern can be found the experimental proving symptoms of which are photographically exact replica of the patient’s state, thus suggesting, again, the functional identity of the biologic mechanisms which underlie the disturbances.
The pathogenetic symptoms of the various medicinal substances thus offer the most precise method of describing or summarizing, rather than defining, the dualistic (soul-body) manifestations of the uniform functional entity. The human dual psychosomatic unit appears in a synthetic replica upon a third level of manifestation: the nonhuman substances and their force patterns.
An analogous situation presents itself in analytical psychology. In the activity of the psyche, inner events are summarized and symbolized in. he form and appearance of outside objects or functions. Many of these symbols are of a strictly subjective character, and depend upon the individual patient’s variable associative patterns. Other symbols, however, are of an almost objective and invariable nature. They have retained an immutable identity of meaning throughout recorded history regardless of person, sex, language, race, nation, or epoch and individual understanding.
They appear not generated by the individual person but to be objective, a priori, existing entities, independent of the individual’s understanding. We might feel almost that they, at times, impress themselves upon a person who, usually, is absolutely unaware of their meaning. For this reason Jung calls them collective symbols.
In the process of symbol formation the psyche carries out a process of identification which links objects and functions of the outer world to the inner soul process upon the basis of what we may call appearance. For instance: the sea is the symbol of the collective unconscious “because it hides unsuspected depth under a reflecting surface”. Green is the symbol of growing, because growth, as found in its purest form in the plant, is invariably characterized by the color green.
Birds are thoughts and flights of mind, etc. Appearance, namely the morphological and behavioristic manifestations of living or lifeless objects, thus plays the same role of linking the inner process to the outer as do the biochemical and physiologic properties of a drug which, as we have seen, link the outside substance to biologic happenings.
