As was recently pointed out by Obermayer,1dermatologists are generally unwilling to discuss psychosomatic relationships or commit themselves to other than morphologically descriptive diagnoses of the disorders which some regard as neurodermatoses. He enumerated possible explanations for such an attitude, but it would seem that the time must have arrived when dermatologists can discuss functional disorders without reticence or apology. In other medical specialties there has been increasing interest in the so-called functional disorders and there are various estimates of their incidence. Investigators interested in psychosomatic relationships in medicine commonly estimate that one third of all patients have disorders initiated by psychic or emotional factors; another third have "physical" diseases which are gravely influenced by such factors, and the remaining third have diseases in which psychic influences are of little or no importance and the structural changes far out-weigh them. The