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The hysteric or psychasthenic autosuggestion resists the mere will of breaking it off. Here, therefore, is the classical ground for strong mental counterinfluences, that is, for psychotherapeutic treatment. Experience shows that the strongest chance for the development of such autosuggestive beliefs exists wherever an emotional disposition is favorable to the arriving belief.
But if those psychotherapeutic hospitals will flourish and the physicians will at last make use of psychical factors in their regular practice, they ought not to forget on their part that the important step forward was taken under the pressure of popular religious movements.
In general it seems to me that it is a great educational advantage to keep open the experiences that connect us with the past of the race, and it may have a psychotherapeutic value which we do not now dream.
If on the other hand we say that we can cure with psychotherapeutic means only the functional brain diseases and define as functional simply those diseases which can be cured by such means, we move, of course, in the most obvious circle and yet just that is the too frequent fate of the discussions in certain quarters.
On the other hand, there were no other nervous symptoms and, with his most acute analysis, he did not find the slightest trace of emotion any longer. When the symptoms reached a point at which they seriously interfered with his comfort, he asked me for psychotherapeutic treatment, under the condition that I was not to apply hypnotism.
From the physician's encouragement and the minister's influence towards new faith in life, a short way leads to the influence of suggestion. It is on the whole the way which leads from the general psychotherapeutic treatment to the specific one directed against particular symptoms. Of course there is no abrupt division between special and general methods.
Among his pupils, usually called mesmerists, was Puysèyur, who discovered, in 1784, the state which was called artificial somnambulism, a kind of sleep in which the ideas and feelings of the magnetized can be guided by the magnetizer. Here evidently was the first recognition of the psychotherapeutic variation which we call today hypnotism.
Only in incipient cases, especially of melancholia and mania, the psychotherapeutic work seems not entirely hopeless; and for epilepsy some distinct successes cannot be denied. We have reviewed the whole field of psychophysical disturbances, those produced through external conditions in the normal brain and those resulting from abnormal brain constitution.
Thus in a psychotherapeutic system, religion has only to take its place in line with many other efforts to inhibit the feeling of misery and to reënforce will and self-control by submission under a greater will.
It can be said with certainty that hundreds of thousands leave the offices of their doctors every year without relief where relief could be secured by psychotherapeutic means. To be sure, one reply of the physicians is not infrequent and carries some weight. Psychotherapeutic methods demand much time and patience and skill.
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