Medicine: All in Your Mind

She was pretty, but she had a chronic runny nose. She had to blow it so much it completely messed up her social life. But her real trouble wasn’t her nose at all: her father & mother had always treated her as a boy and the otherwise normal young woman used her sniffles as a subterfuge to keep young men at arm’s length. When she realized what was really the matter with her, her nose stopped running. And eventually she married happily.

The girl with the sniffles was a clear case of psychosomatics. The vogue of psychosomatic (mind and body) medicine is so new that the word is in only the newest medical dictionaries. But good doctors have always known that the mind can cause aches & pains, can even be a major factor in diseases, including infections. Dr. Leland Hinsie, Columbia professor of psychiatry, has written a little book, The Person in the Body (W. W. Norton; $2.75), which gives many examples of the tricks the mind can play on the body.

Most of the patients described by Dr. Hinsie just never grew up. There was the married man, for example, with three children. He had diarrhea for no physical reason. The psychosomatic reason: his parents had never shown him much attention except once when he had typhoid fever (characterized by diarrhea). His wife, a woman very like his mother, and his children never gave him much notice either. Hence his diarrhea, an unconscious play for attention.

Dr. Hinsie describes several types subject to psychosomatic ills. Examples:

¶ The hysteroid person is a show-off as a child, a complainer as a grownup. He (or she) is a “bachelor in marriage,” holding firmly to the apron strings of both parents and using ill health as a method of sadistically dominating his family.

¶ The neurasthenoid person hurts all over, wakes up tired and can always think of some eating mistake, or a draft, or a change in routine, to account for his misery. Many such “chronic invalids” give away the fact that they are not really sick by being crashing business successes.