THE HISTORICAL DESCARTES

Ajarring surprise greets the reader of 20th century psychoso-matic literature who comes to it after having been immersed in 17th and 18th century materials. The mind-body dualism credited to Descartes is referred to with uncommon frequency and is usually said to have exercised an overwhelmingly negative influ-ence on modem medicine. Roy R. Grinker, for example, bitterly blames Cartesian dualism for separating the "mind as subject from body as object and creating a dichotomy that even now blocks unitary concepts " (p. 69).1 Many similar references in the literature exhibit the charac-teristic features of a shared mythology.2-4 Rather than presenting a nuanced and unfolding interpretation based on fresh readings of the primary historical texts, modem authors in the field ofpsycho-somatics regularly repeat stock phrases and offer minor variations of identical interpretations. Descartes is depicted as a villain whose dualistic theory sharply separated mind from body, leaving an earlier holistic medicine in disarray.s By contrast, modem psychosomatic theory is portrayed as an effort to restore organis-mic theory to the position it occupied in classical medicine.6 The existence in modem psychosomatic literature of ideas that strike a student of the 17th and 18th centuries as a "Cartesian mythology " raises several important questions. For if the true historical Descartes and the mythic Descartes differ substantially, what purpose-not necessarily conscious-does this mythologi-cal reconstruction serve for American psychosomaticists? Why are they so attracted to a particular, antiheroic version of medical history? What ideological and emotional needs does it serve? This brief essay cannot possibly answer all of these questions, but it can suggest a plausible approach to their resolution. First we must turn back to the 17th and 18th centuries and pursue the true historical Descartes