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Updated: June 25, 2025
And if we had to write a handbook for physicians, it would certainly be the desirable way, in spite of the too frequent repetitions which would become necessary. But as our aim is only a discussion of principles of psychotherapy, we have no right to use this method. Moreover, such a method would suggest the misleading view that the psychotherapist is called and is able to treat diseases.
In certain cases, the subject remembers such particular experiences as the beginning of his discomfort; in others, especially those of hysteric character, the starting point may have long been forgotten, and yet that early impression evidently left traces in the brain which produce disturbances in conscious life. The psychotherapist nowadays calls these groups of traces "complexes."
Certainly there exists a constitutional neurasthenia sometimes but we have hardly a right to deny that overstrain in the brain activity may produce a series of neurasthenic symptoms in any brain, and the special predisposition is responsible rather for the particular selection among the innumerable symptoms. Neurasthenia certainly is the classical ground for the psychotherapist.
For them everybody has the good advice that they ought to overcome their fancies; and yet they feel their life ruined with their endless fight against the overpowering enemy. And if anywhere, it is here that the psychotherapist is successful. Psychasthenic fear can be removed, while the developed melancholic depression, for instance, is entirely beyond the reach of psychical influence.
The most exceptional and most uncanny occurrences of the hospital teach after all the same which our daily experience ought to teach us: there is no subconsciousness. We have discussed the psychological tools with which the psychotherapist has to work but we have not spoken as yet of psychotherapy itself.
Yet the different tendency is easily recognized, if we turn only, for instance, from the mere sympathy and encouragement to the method of reasoning with the patient about the origin of his special complaint. Just now the medical profession moves along this line a great deal. Of course no well-trained psychotherapist will make the blunder of arguing with the insane.
Even the method of automatic writing may here sometimes lead to an unveiling of those deepest layers of suppressed desires. In the same way a careful, subtle analysis of dreams may support the search for the hidden source of interference. We have spoken of the technical methods of the psychotherapist.
That they can be related to an entirely different series of purposes, to the system of our moral ideas, ought not to withdraw the attention of the psychotherapist from his only aim, to cure the patient. The highest moral appeal may be even a most unfit method of treatment and the religious emotion may just as well do harm as good from the point of view of the physician.
Of course, the patient does not accept the explanation at once. He feels sure that he is not accessible to suggestion and that he has least of all a tendency to autosuggestions, but the skillful psychotherapist will find somewhere an opening for the entering wedge.
Of course the background of a hygienic life of the community remains the philosophy of life which gives unity to the scattered energies and consequently steadiness to the individual through all his hazards of fate. It might seem doubtful whether society could get the prescription for such a steady view of the world also from the workshop of the psychotherapist.
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