ABSTRACT
A jarring surprise greets the reader of twentieth-century American psychosomatic literature who comes to it after having been immersed in seventeenth-century materials and eighteenth-century materials. If Cartesian dualism truly influenced medicine in Descartes' own day or soon thereafter, it would most likely have exerted its influence in the specific areas of medical theory, where conventional wisdom already underscored psychosomatic relationships. Descartes' mind–body dualism is referred to with uncommon frequency, and, implicitly or explicitly, dualism is usually said to have exercised an overwhelmingly negative influence on the developmental course of modern medical theory. The theory of the somatic influence of imagination was closely connected to that of the passions. From another angle, the neoclassical theory of the passions seems clearly to rest on the notion, traceable ultimately to Plato, that the soul is divided into several sometimes warring parts. Thus, the soul has no 'parts' which like persons in a power struggle strive to overcome one another.
