The Conception of Psychosomatic Medicine in Spain: From Neurology to the Person

Abstract

As natural medicine dwindled toward the end of the nineteenth century, new perspectives emerged enabling science to deal with why a person becomes ill. This change took place in view of the presence of a scientific, philosophical, and cultural humus. Psychoanalysis, philosophical anthropology, and particularly the expansion of neurology played a unique role: these fields include a human social dimension and attempt to overcome the corporal mechanicism passed down by Descartes, as well as dualism, a causal structure between the psychic and the somatic. In Spain, the physician Juan Rof Carballo (1905–1994) became the father of psychosomatic medicine due to his university education, teachers, open mindedness, and interest in everything human, allowing him to witness these new ways of thinking about the person and also the ill person. He published Psychosomatic Pathology (1949) together with other important works such as The Internal Brain and the Emotional World (1952). The key concept of his proposal is the affective warp. This chapter analyzes the various sources that make up the psychosomatic perspective, emphasizing the role played by neurology and “the constitutive process” of man (Rof Carballo uses the term “man” in a generic sense). To justify the selection of this author, bibliometric data were used. This study, centered on a historical perspective, attempts to shed light on the present, in which neuroscientific advances and the humanization of medicine do not always share the same fate.