ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with comparisons between different stages in the development of societies which may have an influence on the incidence and cause of psychosomatic diseases. The concept of a civilizing process itself has, among other things, an explanatory function. It focuses attention on changes in the social standards of human conduct and sentiment and thus also of illnesses connected with them. Arms and legs are geared for an action they are never called upon to perform. Such discrepancies between activities of central nervous system in normal and emergency situations and activities of the vegetative branch of the nervous system anticipating an emergency situation may well give rise to psychosomatic disorders. Especially the increasingly effective curbing of state-internal violence suggests an hypothesis with regard to psychosomatic disorders. The question that suggests itself is that of a possible connection between the high effectiveness which the monopoly of physical violence has attained in most parliamentary nation-states and high incidence of psychosomatic disorders.
