ABSTRACT
In the post World War II period, and for the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, psychodynamic thinking dominated psychiatric thinking and research in the United States (Grob, 1991). There was much popular speculative theory about ‘psychosomatic’ processes but little rigorous investigation. Much emphasis in American psychiatry was on early developmental processes and the role of personality in disease. British psychiatry, and European psychiatry more generally, followed a stricter medical model. There was not much epidemiological work at the time, but what little there was, was highly descriptive and not very exciting, typically counting disease events in relation to conventional socio-demographic categories. The concepts of ‘stress’, ‘social support’, ‘coping’ and many others we now take for granted had not yet become serious focuses for research and there were few plausible or researchable models of intervening pathways.
