Malignant Histories: Psychosomatic Medicine and the Female Cancer Patient in the Postwar Era

Cancer had often been linked with unhappy emotions in the past, but this association entered a new phase in the middle of the 20th century as a result of research in the field of psychosomatic medicine conducted in the United States during the 1950s. These researchers focused particularly upon cancer in women, and were strongly influenced by the prevailing psychoanalytic orthodoxy surrounding the nature of femininity and normal female sexuality. The results of these studies, which appeared in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, confirmed the personality-cancer link but were rife with erroneous assumptions and faulty methodologies. They were widely publicized, nonetheless, and were instrumental in promoting the association between repression and cancer, especially in women. Despite criticism, their influence was manifest in psycho-oncological research in many countries during the decades which followed and in popular notions of the “cancer personality.”