lmfao nice account it's an important point to make, that clearly there is an "organic" component and a "psychic" component to every ailment (or human experienc

lmfao nice account it's an important point to make, that clearly there is an "organic" component and a "psychic" component to every ailment (or human experience for that matter). as anyone who has recovered from a primarily psychosomatic chronic illness can attest, you're eventually faced again with the contradiction between organic and psychic when you get your first head cold or whatever. this is a question of internal vs. external, dialectical vs. mechanical. if someone murders me, we could assume this is a mechanical act. the immediate death obviously wasn't some sort of psychosomatic construction. no matter how mentally prepared i was for the moment the bullet pierced my forehead, a fundamental biological law asserted itself and there was nothing i could do about it. but here we have no problem jumping straight to asking the question "what was the murderer's motive?" perhaps i was in the middle of robbing a bank. why was i robbing the bank? naturally these answers help construct the etiology of the death (and extend into other etiologies!). the question is: where do we draw the lines between moments? the radical answer is that we shouldn't. we should be willing at any moment to consider the many possible ways in which the various forces interact. bring the mechanical into the dialectic, so to speak. in this light, is "stress" a useful etiological category? i don't think so, or at least i think its utility is much weaker than the pharmaceutical industry would hope. freud had a client named elizabeth von r whose leg pain of two years was suddenly cured after working through its origin: her father, on his death bed, would rest his head on her legs as von r cared for him. was von r's leg pain caused by "stress?" hardly more than it was caused by "living." both of these proposed causes are obviously cop-outs. edit: the point then is not to find the singular cause or plural causes. the point is to abstract the forces to analyze their underlying laws of motion and then to creatively synthesize them to predict and change the future. that's what science is. this is not the level of operation of our medical or psychiatric industries or their researchers.