Abstract
Psychosomatic studies on cancer were carried out with a patient with Hodgkin's disease and with leukemic children. The patient, a 29 y. 0. female, with Hodgkin's disease began to show anxiety reactions against her therapies after 8 years' treatment. Her main symptoms were vomiting, anorexia, weightloss and shivering of her body and these were enhanced before medication was to be administered. So any cancer therapy Could not be done in the cancer center concerned. After moving to the ward for psychosomatic Patients in our department, she was given interview therapy and autogenic training. By the interview therapy alone, her irritation did not change in spite of expression of her sad feelings. By AT and supportive therapies, she became relaxed gradually and her symptoms decreased. The body weight increased from 28.5kg to 33.5kg. We discussed the effectiveness and evaluation of psychotherapies for the terminal cancer patient. In the study on the leukemic children, PF study, diagnostic test for parent-child relationship, Life Change Unit(LCU), mother's estimation of daily attitudes of leukemic children and interviews with both parent and the child were done. The results showed characteristic features of leukemic children as compared to healthy children and asthmatic children. These features included strong self-confidence, suppression of their emotions, lack of dependency on their mothers, and weak parent-child relationship. Some of these result were similar to the reports on western leukemic children. Furthermore, there found some similarities to the characteristics of the personality traits of adult cancer patients. This suggested that the cancer presonality was already formed in childhood. The problems belonging to families were also mentioned.
