FORESTILLINGSBILLEDET SOM FORBINDELSESLED MELLEM KROP OG PSYKE

Abstract

Historically, the concept of mental imagery has been pervasive in attempts to understand the role of the »psyche« in health and disease, and the utilization of mental images seems to have been an important element in traditional therapeutic procedures. With the establishment of biomedicine as dominant in the scientific understanding of health and pathology, psychosocial factors were excommunicated from the field of medicine, and the possible influence of the imagination on physiological processes has only recently gained partial scientific legitimacy. Although the dominance of the biomedical scientific paradigm apparently is being upheld by a number of stabilizing historical and socioeconomic factors, biomedicine is currently being challenged by a growing number of observations of »unexplainable« interactions between psychosocial factors and bodily processes. Observations of effects of the imagination on a number of physiological phenomena call for scientific explanations which cannot be delivered by a scientific paradigm, which is dominated by the separation of »body« and »mind«, and underscore the importance of interdisciplinary biopsychosocial approaches in theory and research.