From Causation to Correlation: The Story of Psychosomatic Medicine 1939–1979

This study focuses on the first four decades inthe history of the pioneering journal Psychosomatic Medicine. The goal of thejournal as stated by its founders was to reformmedicine by scientifically reintegrating the``mind'' into medicine. However, from itsinception, the editorial members were hauntedby internal ambiguity regarding the nature ofpsychosomatic knowledge. This led to recurrentidentity crises. This study tells the story ofthe complex interplay between internal andexternal forces shaping PsychosomaticMedicine's institutional transitions andepistemological transformations. Itdemonstrates how, despite this continuousinternal confusion, the level of consistencynecessary for gaining legitimacy increasedduring the process of evaluating papers. Theincreased level of standardization coincidedwith a transition in the psychosomaticmovement's epistemological approach: from causation to correlation. The initialattempt to search for causal mechanismslinking the psyche and the soma were replacedby correlational models measuring variousmanifestations of psychological and biologicalphenomena in a way that presupposed andreduplicated the split the founders ironicallysought to supersede.