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Updated: June 6, 2025
It would be short-sighted to overlook the serious obstacles which stand in the way. But while the social life outside of the circle of real disease may better go on without direct interference by psychotherapeutic influences, it is certainly the duty of the community to make the underlying principles of psychotherapy useful for the sound development of society.
Moreover, the temporary relief is the safest basis to work towards the prevention of a recurrence of the evil. Only in two directions is further restriction needed. Psychotherapeutic methods are in my opinion of very small avail in cases of periodic drinkers.
But as soon as we handle this thought as a psychotherapeutic remedy, destined to restitute the disturbed psychological equilibrium, it becomes evident that the very uniformity of it makes it a clumsy, inadjustable pattern. If there is anything which impresses the careful student of psychology, it is the over-rich manifoldness, the complexity of mental life.
The feeble-minded and the retarded child, the perverse child and the emotionally unstable child, belong under the care of the physician, and in such a case he ought not to hesitate to use the whole supply of psychotherapeutic methods which are at his disposal. Still more complex is the criminological problem.
There will be no startling stories of dissociated personalities, such as appear perhaps every few years on the horizon of the medical world, but we shall speak of those who every day in every town carry their trouble to the waiting room of the doctor and who might return more happily if he had more well-trained interest in the psychotherapeutic factors.
Both psychodiagnostic and psychotherapeutic studies must be devoted to cases in which the mind itself is abnormal, further to cases in which the normal minds registers the abnormalities in other parts of the body, and finally to cases in which the normal mind influences abnormal processes in the body.
It is one of the surest tests of psychotherapeutic skill to discriminate wisely whether one or the other of these features of general treatment ought to be emphasized. They usually demand more insight than specific forms of psychotherapy like hypnotic suggestions.
We see from here the direction in which many psychotherapeutic efforts must lie, efforts which are entirely within the limits of the daily normal experience, and belong to the medical practice of every physician, yes, to the helpful influence of every man in practical life. The intemperate man may suffer from his inability to resist his desire for whiskey.
To the superficial observer the opposite might seem evident, as every word of our psychotherapeutic study indicated that that is a view of life which makes man's inner experience simply an effect of foregoing causes. All life becomes a psychophysical mechanism and from that point of view man's thinking and acting become the necessary outcome of the foregoing conditions.
Even where cure by psychotherapeutic means is out of the question, as is the case with feverish delirium or uræmic excitements, no skilled physician ignores the aid which a well-adjusted mental influence can offer to the patient. We come to a third group. Some outside cause has harmed the central nervous system directly, and has left it in a disabled state after the cause itself has disappeared.
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