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Updated: June 2, 2025
The precise psychophysical mechanism through which the different moods are aroused is for the most part hidden from us; yet in certain particulars we can form some idea of it.
The psychophysical system itself was not really harmed by such influences. In the following groups, such is no longer the case. We here think at first of those severe injuries which have their sources in abnormal processes outside of the brain. The anæmia of the patient or the low state of his nutrition or the fever heat of his blood impairs the harmony of the mental functions.
I learned to understand an 'idea' as a process no less melting and fleeting than an act of feeling or of will, and I comprehended the older doctrine of association of 'ideas' to be no longer tenable.... Besides all this, experimental observation yielded much other information about the span of consciousness, the rapidity of certain processes, the exact numerical value of certain psychophysical data, and the like.
Everywhere among the uncritical masses such appeals reach individuals whose psychophysical attitudes make such influences vivid and overpowering. Every one knows, too, those often clever linguistic forms which are to aid the suggestion. They are to inhibit the opposing impulses. The mere use of the imperative, to be sure, has gradually become an ineffective, used-up pattern.
But at least the causal principle is now fully recognized and the scientific man of today no longer doubts that this whole play of psychotherapeutic processes goes on as a causal process in the psychophysical system of the individual without any mysteriousness, without any magnetic influences, without any miraculous interference, without any agencies except those which are working in our ordinary mental life in attention and reaction, in memory and sleep.
To prescribe drugs is always quicker than to influence the mind; to cure a morphinist by hyoscine needs less effort than to cure him by suggestion. The first method to bring back the psychophysical equilibrium is of course the one which is also demanded by common-sense, namely, to remove the external sources of the disturbance.
The psychologist knows the interesting psychophysical law according to which the differences in the strength of our impressions are perceived as equal, not when the differences of the stimuli are really equal, but when the stimuli stand in the same relation.
The profusion of small attractive devices which automatically perform the economic household labor and disburden the human workers must not hide the fact that the chief activities are still little adjusted to the psychophysical conditions.
Seen from a causal point of view, however, there is no miracle in it at all. On the contrary, it is a natural psychophysical process which demands careful supervision not to become dangerous.
Suggestion and hypnotism certainly must play a large part in psychotherapy and that part does not become smaller by the fact that we reject the subconscious interpretation of them and consider them entirely as psychophysical processes. And in the same way undoubtedly we have to acknowledge the psychophysiological effect of persuasion and of the appeals to the conscious intellect and will.
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