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Updated: June 6, 2025
Even in cases where the disease itself is inaccessible to psychotherapeutic treatment, the superadded grief and worry brought on by the disease might yield to the mental influence and the whole situation would to a high degree be transformed for the better by it.
Psychotherapeutic hospitals would offer the most favorable conditions for such coöperation. But the minister ought to enter even such a hospital with a strictly spiritual aim, and he should never forget that the task of the church stands much higher than the utilitarian task of removing pain from the sick room.
But from such barbarisms we come by gradual steps to the suggestion of improvement where the feeling of betterment can be in itself an important factor for the cure. Yet even there we must not mistake the possible secondary effect of a mental change from a psychotherapeutic cure of the bodily disease.
A systematic training of the power of inhibition is indeed the fundamental factor in all psychotherapeutic treatment when the disturbance is in the volitional sphere, but the inhibition is secured most safely by reënforcement of the antagonistic attitude.
In such a case the treatment may cover three or four months, if it is to be of lasting value and without any damage during the treatment. Still we are not at the end of the psychotherapeutic methods and we may turn to a fascinating group of curative efforts which has especially come to the foreground in recent years.
And yet, on the other hand, there is no department of medicine in which the treatment might not profit by the psychotherapeutic influence. With a few vague words of encouragement mechanically uttered, or with a routine of tricks of suggestion by bread pills and colored water and tuning forks, not much will be gained even in the ordinary physician's practice.
Those who think that for hypnotizing especially inborn power is needed stand, of course, outside of a serious discussion. They do not even know the elements of the modern theories. Every physician has in himself the necessary means for a psychotherapeutic treatment in every form.
The literature indeed is almost entirely supplied from these two quarters: and yet it is evident that neither the one nor the other party can give to the problem its most natural setting. The student of mental diseases naturally emphasizes the abnormal features of the situation, and thus brings the psychotherapeutic process too much into the neighborhood of pathology.
Letters like the two following, for instance, are hardly letters of patients. They show a variation which is still entirely within normal limits and yet a source of suffering; it is a disturbance which usually can be removed by psychotherapeutic means. "I do almost everything with effort, nothing spontaneously. I have been writing for five years but am a mood writer of the worst type.
This element of suggestion is quite obvious when the argument takes the form of persuasion, a psychotherapeutic method which has found its independent development. Whoever seeks to persuade relies on the mental fringe of his propositions.
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