It was recognized long before the birth of Freud and of psychoanalysis that the mental attitude of the patient has an important if not a decisive influence on the course of bodily disease. Milton expresses the almost universal striving for life in spite of the sufferings of illness when he says:

“And that must end us : that must be our cure—
To be no more. Sad cure ! for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
Devoid of sense and motion? ”

In more recent times, almost the whole of the work of Pavlov (1928), and particularly that of his pupil Bykov, is devoted to emphasizing the role of the cortex and higher brain centres in the determination of bodily reactions.