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The following paragraph is taken from the Life article: "What about psychiatry and psychoanalysis? This is a different matter. Many unhappy and problem-ridden people, though by no means all who have tried it, have profited from psychotherapy.
Having discussed in detail the various symptoms and theoretic aspects of the benign stupors, it may be well to have these observations and speculations summarized. It being established that stupors occur as a temporary form of insanity psychiatry is faced at once with the problem of describing these conditions accurately in order to ascertain their nosological position.
The art of psychiatry consists largely in bringing into consciousness some of the content of this submerged nine-tenths, and as a practitioner I can testify to its difficulty and uncertainty. "We are so habituated to conscious thought that when we reach some conclusion by any nonconscious process, we speak of it as a 'hunch, or an 'intuition, and question its validity.
And the theory of heredity, hypnotism, the discoveries of Pasteur and of Koch, hygiene based on statistics, and the work of Zemstvo doctors! Psychiatry with its modern classification of mental diseases, methods of diagnosis, and treatment, was a perfect Elborus in comparison with what had been in the past.
A bureau of family advice such as has been suggested should be under unimpeachable auspices from the point of view of medicine and psychiatry; it should have the services not only of expert social workers and experts in household management, but of doctors and psychiatrists as well.
This stream became broader and broader and every new development of psychiatry in the last hundred years did new justice to the influence of psychological means in the treatment of mental diseases; to be sure, without allowing up to the present day the hope that mental factors as such can cure the grave forms of insanity.
For scientific psychology is a part of physiology, the doctrine of the functions and the life-activities of organisms. The psychology and psychiatry of the future, like the physiology and pathology of to-day, must take the form of a cellular study, and in the first instance investigate the soul-functions of the cells.
As one syllabus declared, they set out to teach "every branch of physical, biological, and sociological science: astronomy, cosmology, anthropology, ethnology, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, geography, languages, esthetics, logic, etc." Enough to split the skull of Pico della Mirandola.
Lewis R. Wolberg, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry, New York Medical College, recently canvassed 30 experts in the field of hypnosis and found a few who felt symptom removal was "irrational, temporary or outright dangerous." The large majority, however, "employed symptom removal where indicated, and minimized or ridiculed any possible bad effects."
Psychotherapy is the practice of treating the sick by influencing the mental life. It stands at the side of physicotherapy, which attempts to cure the sick by influencing the body, perhaps with drugs and medicines, or with electricity or baths or diet. Psychotherapy is sharply to be separated from psychiatry, the treatment of mental diseases.
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