ABSTRACT
About one third of the patients seen in the general practice of medicine have psychoneurotic problems. When such a person arrives at the physician's office it is soon apparent that he has a variety of mental and physical complaints that are not associated with any structural changes in the body adequate to explain them. Originally, it was felt that the primary cause of these conditions was a weakness or some actual organic change in the nervous system. But this has never been substantiated and now it is realized that most of these functional alterations are inextricably bound up with repressed emotional conflicts resulting from the individual's experiences.
