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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.
The unprejudiced psychotherapist will be perfectly able to find room for such cures and, if it is the duty of the scientific physician to make use of every natural energy in the interest of the patient's health, he has no right to neglect the overwhelming powers of the apparently mysterious states.
This second way demands that the psychotherapist bring this primary experience strongly to consciousness and then by a new training link it with new and more desirable associations and reactions. The disturbing idea is thus not to be discharged but to be sidetracked so that in future it leads to harmless results. The new setting works towards an entirely new equilibrium.
At last memories and lost emotions come again to the surface, and the watchful psychotherapist may discover the complex, which is then to be removed by discharge or by side-tracking. This is the so-called psychoanalytic method. Finally the psychotherapist may go still one step further.
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.
Our discussion only seeks to point out that whatever else he may be, he must be also a psychotherapist. The more conservative method which befits us may be, therefore, the method of dealing with symptoms only and abstracting from the more ambitious plan of discussing the diseases entire. We simply separate the mental symptoms and the bodily symptoms which the psychotherapist is to remove.
And that was worse than not knowing. "If only I could understand. Then, I believe, I could bear it. I wouldn't care how bad it was as long as I understood." "Ask McClane, then. He could explain it to you. It's beyond me." "McClane?" "He's a psychotherapist. He knows more about people's souls than I know about their bodies. He probably knows all about Conway's soul."
A good conscience, a congenial home, and a serious purpose are after all the safest conditions for a healthy mind, and the community works in preventive psychotherapy wherever it facilitates the securing of these three factors. For that end society may take over directly from the workshop of the psychotherapist quite a number of almost technical methods. Suggestion is one of them.
Yet before we analyze some typical symptoms, it might be wise to review the whole series of means and tools which the psychotherapist finds at his disposal. The psychological work of the physician does not begin with his curative efforts. Therapy is always only the last step.
Yet mere flippant excitement and superficial entertainment is nothing but a cheap counterfeit of what is needed. Voluntary effort is needed, and this is the field where the psychotherapist must put in his most intelligent effort. There is no one for whom there is not a chance for work in our social fabric.
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