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Updated: June 6, 2025
Psychotherapeutic influence may remove the phobia of a psychasthenic or the obsession of a neurasthenic or the emotion of a hysteric, and thus may bring not only momentary relief but a change which may be favorable for general improvement, but certainly the neurasthenia and psychasthenia and hysteria are not really removed by it.
In the field of insanity, naturally the physician at once goes to an examination on his own account, but in the borderland regions of the psychasthenics and hysterics and neurasthenics, the intellectual clearness of the patient too easily tempts one into trusting the sincerity of his story; and yet the most important ideas clustering perhaps about love or ambition, about vice or crime, about business failure or family secrets, about inherited or acquired diseases may be cunningly withheld and may frustrate every psychotherapeutic influence.
Quite near stand chorea and the epidemic impulses to imitative movements. And we might bring into this neighborhood also the disturbance in the equilibrium of the speech movements through all degrees of stammering and severe impairment. Up to a certain degree, though not often completely, they too yield easily to psychotherapeutic influence.
On the other hand, I may say that I have not seen a single case in which a really patient and insistent treatment of morphinism has not been successful, even if the destructive dose of forty grains a day had become habitual. The condition is only that the patient himself have the best will, a will which yet is not strong enough to win the fight without psychotherapeutic help.
If we were carelessly to identify the reparable troubles with those which we cannot recognize visibly, we should be at a loss to understand why, for instance, many forms of insanity are entirely beyond our psychotherapeutic influences.
Thus persuasion relies on personal powers to secure conviction where the logic of the argument is insufficient to overcome contradictions. But just for that reason persuasion is after all only a special kind of suggestion. Other methods work on the same basis. Prominent among them is the psychotherapeutic effect of a formal assurance.
"Mental Health" is defined in terms of our mental "members" in the classical way, and the "Ten Maxims of Wise Living," which are given, are selected from the history of moral philosophy rather than from current psychotherapeutic results.
On the other hand, every physician who uses psychotherapeutic means is surprised to see the effective bodily readjustment where serious disturbances perhaps of the circulatory system or the digestive system existed.
"All physicians of broad practice and keen observation realise that certain pains may be alleviated or cured, and that certain morbid conditions may be made to disappear, provided a change in the mental state of the patient can be brought about. . . . It does not require special learning to build up a psychotherapeutic practice based upon the observation of such cases; and the Christian Science healers, narrowly educated and of narrow experience, have done just this thing, resting upon the theory that the mental influence of the healer is the effective curative agent.
It must be acknowledged that a method which has such powerful influence over the mind that it can secure ideas and emotions and impulses which the own will of the patient cannot produce, ought to be allowed only to those who are prepared for its skillful use. To hypnotize or to perform any persistent psychotherapeutic treatment may thus be dangerous, if it is done by the unfit.
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