ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to use sociology of medicine broadened by psychoanalysis to approach the commodification of the human body. In this context, the discoveries of research in medical psychology and medical sociology in the domain of organ transplantation serve as signposts, and were interpreted psychoanalytically as providing information about the effect of society on the subject. In psychoanalysis the analyst's interpretation informs us about the repressed and tabooed, the phenomena indebted to sedimented experience. The development of a social psychology of medicine not only encountered conceptual problems, but also faced and still faces the obstacle of the historical tradition of the discipline of medical psychology. In the sociological and historical studies of the body partly, the academic discipline of medicine and the physician's activity as a whole becomes an object of research for the social sciences that are guided by a sociocultural and cultural anthropological interest in the human body.
