This book offers a good summary of the current knowledge on psychosomatics. Shoenberg's writing style is highly readable, very clear and to the point, avoiding unnecessary detours that waste the reader's time. This virtue of the text is, at the same time, its worst defect, as its content is limited to the bare facts. Further elaboration of the ideas by the author would have been desirable.
Although it falls short of the exhaustive review scholars are fond of, it provides more than enough material to satisfy both professionals and aficionados who approach the topic of psychosomatics.
In the preface, Shoenberg warns us of the difficult challenge of psychosomatics, to ride two horses at the same time: the psyche and the soma. Throughout the book he takes on much more as he tells us about the findings of physiology, neurobiology, medicine, phenomenology, general psychiatry, psychoanalysis and other psychotherapeutic schools. Also including approaches to literature and poetry, he illustrates his accounts with lively clinical examples. Certainly, he avoids falling in one of the most common pits of the studies on psychosomatics, that of oversimplification. However, he doesn't successfully integrate all these sources of information in a comprehensive model, rather just puts them together.
One chapter is dedicated to his teaching work with medical students. It seems to me that, through his work on Balint groups and offering doctors an experience of psychotherapy, he is promoting the use of psychosomatics at a clinical level and preparing the ground for its theoretical integration in the future. He concludes by stating that each system of thinking has its place, leaving it to the reader (or to the future) to find out what that may be.
In summary, I consider this a highly informative book either as a first approach to psychosomatics or as an up-to-date reference guide for the profession.
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