Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
Even the mere suppression of the pain works backwards on the bodily disease which produces it. The pain was a starting point for disturbing reactions; with its disappearance through psychotherapeutic influence, the reactions of the irritated brain come to rest, the diseased body can carry on its struggle without interference and may win the day.
Yet I speak of temporary cure and I refer here especially to the restriction with which I introduced the psychotherapeutic methods in general. They do not deal with diseases but with symptoms; and they certainly do not deal with constitutions, but with results of the coöperation of constitution and circumstances.
Certainly the symptoms of the circulatory insanity disappear completely in the free intervals; there is no reason to give up hope that psychotherapy might find the way to hasten the appearance of such a normal period. But we have emphasized from the start that the psychotherapeutic work has not only to set in when the disturbance itself lies in the psychophysical system.
This is an influence which is most easily misunderstood and which has most often become the starting point for misleading theories. Before we enter into the study of the practical effects of suggestion and the psychotherapeutic results, we must examine this tool in the hand of the psychotherapist from a purely psychological viewpoint.
The first chapters of this volume may appear like a long, tiresome way around before we come to our goal, the study of the psychotherapeutic agencies. And yet it is the only possible way to overcome the superficiality with which the discussion is too often carried on; we must understand exactly how the psychological analysis and explanation of the scientist differ from the popular point of view.
This, I was told, was against the law, but that it might be found practicable to use glass boxes. In any case the gains are enough to run these cantines. The girls are almost always good looking and well bred, and they look very serious in their white uniform with the red cross on the sleeves; and the psychotherapeutic influence is too strong for any one to resist.
There is no reason at all for promising that the patient will be entirely cured if the physician believes that a real cure through suggestion is impossible. The more the true physicians undertake psychotherapeutic work, the more it will carry with it that dignity which is now too often lost by the predominance of those who treat without diagnosis and cure by mere appeal to superstition.
The efforts of the psychotherapist will move over as large a part of the disease as possible and cover, perhaps, the causes of the disturbance as far as they are of psychical origin. Yet it would remain dilettanteism if we were to accept the popular view that the mere psychotherapeutic aid is a sufficient treatment of the whole disease. The physician has to be much more than a psychotherapist.
Certainly there is no physician who is not liable to make mistakes, and a physician who has never given any attention to psychology and psychiatry would also be a rather poor agent of psychotherapeutic methods, but the probability is that such a physician would simply abstain by principle from all psychotherapeutic methods; his mistake only begins if from his lack of acquaintance with the subject he draws the conclusion that the method itself is undesirable.
The final outcome is therefore practically in every way the same. From whatever starting point we may come, we are led to the conviction that the physician alone is called to administer psychotherapeutic work, but that he needs a thorough psychological training besides his medical one. But the interest of the community is not only a negative one.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking