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Each case belongs to a type which can easily be removed by psychotherapeutic influence, generally even by a skillfully directed autosuggestion. The writer is a young man. "I have always, as long as I can remember, been very nervous and sensitive. When about seven years of age, I was attacked by St. Vitus' Dance. Before that I cannot say whether I was particularly nervous or not.
On the whole it may be said that psychotherapy can gain its easiest triumphs in the field of alcoholism and a wide propagation of psychotherapeutic methods and of a thorough understanding of psychotherapy would be fully justified, even if no other field were accessible but that of the desire for alcoholic intemperance.
From my psychotherapeutic activity, I know too well how much vileness and perversity are gently covered by the term flirtation nowadays in the circle of those who have learned early to conceal the traces. The French type of the demi-vierge is just beginning to play its rôle in the new world.
The discussion of the bodily symptoms which may yield to psychotherapeutic treatment, naturally forms only a short appendix to our discussion of the mental symptoms. Our interest was from the beginning essentially a psychological one. I shall have to be the more brief as my personal experience in the treatment of bodily diseases through mental therapy is entirely secondary and accidental.
Certainly the severity of the symptoms alone does not decide it. As the treatment is entirely empirical, no one can foresee whether or not the situation may change to-morrow. We may find psychotherapeutic schemes by which epilepsy or maniacal depressive insanity or traumatic neuroses may become accessible.
Moreover probably every physician who has a long experience in hypnotizing has found that his confidence in the effectiveness of the deep hypnotic states has been slowly diminished, while his belief in the surprising results of slight hypnotization and of hypnoid states has steadily grown and has encouraged him in his psychotherapeutic efforts.
The effect of the very insistent and urgently repeated hypnotic suggestion during the first rather long treatment was such a surprisingly good one that I decided to continue the psychotherapeutic cure. I hypnotized him daily for two weeks. The belief in the real wrong doings of an enemy disappeared entirely from the first.
The psychotherapeutic methods in the narrower sense of the word are in the present state of our knowledge ineffective in the insane asylum. I should also be unable to speak of laboratory experience with insanity, as I insist on sanitarium treatment in every such case.
The psychotherapeutic treatment of such drug habits demands much patience and much skillful adjustment to the psychological conditions. Its general difference from the treatment of alcoholism is given by the circumstance that any too rapid withdrawing of the drug is certainly dangerous, if the organism is adjusted to a relatively strong dose.
Many indications suggest that a near future will consider this group much larger than we are really justified in doing today, probably soon connecting a number of other mental diseases like dementia præcox with toxic effects of bodily origin. Experience shows that in this group not a few chances exist for successful psychotherapeutic influence.
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