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Abstract
Should the present trend continue, it appears likely that in the not too distant future, planning of psychosomatic research, or psychosomatic research altogether, will be monopolized by psychiatrists and psychologists, with the exclusion of workers in other fields. The recent shift in emphasis from clinical research toward experimental research and to construct theory is, to some extent, a normal and desirable course of events; but the limitations of the experimental approach versus the clinical approach in psychosomatic research should be borne in mind. Careful clinical observations of the correlational type are by no means inferior to statistically proved experimental irrelevancies. As a reaction to growing preoccupation with psychosomatic models largely developed by psychoanalysts, there has been a wave of criticisms against the contributions of psychoanalysts to psychosomatic medicine which, iconoclastically, goes too far. Consequently psychoanalysts, of late, have turned their research interests away from psychosomatic medicine. Psychosomatic medicine is no longer exclusively confined to the psychological approach to medicine but its aims are a comprehensive, holistic approach to the problems of medicine. To attain this new objective all four parameters of a pluralistic concept of health and ill health must be adequately covered;- the biological, psychological, social, and the cultural parameter. This view implies that, more than hitherto, the cooperation of geneticists, of internists, of epidemiologists, and of social scientists is required. The future of psychosomatic medicine lies in a multidisciplinary approach.