By the late 1940s, many psychiatrists, influenced in part by their successful treatment of soldiers who had developed psychiatric problems in battle, had come to believe that psychoanalytic insights might be useful in treating medical illnesses that did not respond readily to drugs. Diseases such as hypertension, asthma, gastric ulcers, and ulcerative colitis were thought to be psychosomatic—that is, induced by unconscious conflicts. Thus by 1960 psychoanalytical theory had become for many psychiatrists, particularly those on the East and West coasts of the United States, the prevailing model
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