Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 25, 2025
No one can measure the injury done to the psychophysical balance of the weaker brains, for instance, by the sensational court gossip and reports of murder trials in the newspapers for the masses. But while the influence of suggestion is on the whole familiar to public opinion, the community is much less aware of another factor which we found important in the hands of the psychotherapist.
I myself had diphtheria three times in my life; my constitution is thus probably especially favorable to that disease but I do not estimate less the fact that I was perfectly cured the second time, in spite of the fact that I caught it a few years later a third time. To be sure, such experiences of relapse cannot be spared any psychotherapist. I may give a typical instance.
The psychotherapist assures the patient that he will sleep the next night or that the pain will disappear or that he will be able to walk with such firmness that the counter-idea is undermined.
In a parallel line comes the effective aid by the stimulation of hope and the suppression of fear, by suggestion of a feeling of encouragement and the inhibition of the emotions of worry. This is a field where even the average physician is most easily inclined to play the amateur psychotherapist.
And in all cases emotional reaction may set in with anxieties, and bodily symptoms such as palpitation of the heart may result, whenever an effort is made to disregard the nervous fear. There is perhaps no group of patients which so much deserves the most careful efforts of the psychotherapist. Still more than the hysterics they suffer from the fate of seeing their ills counted as not real.
He must be got out of Belgium." "You always wanted to get him away." "Only because I saw he would break down." "How could you tell?" "I'm a psychotherapist. It's my business to tell." But she was still on the defensive. "You never liked him." "I neither like nor dislike him. To me Conway is simply a sick man. If I could cure him " "Can't you?" "Not as you think.
To discharge that intrusion leads therefore only to the elimination of those symptoms which resulted from it, but the primary disturbance goes on and any new chance intrusion will produce new explosions. The psychotherapist should therefore go deeper and relieve the mind from those primary desires which may belong to early youth and which are entirely forgotten.
We have seen that the work of the psychotherapist is of very unequal value in different parts of the field; in some, as in neurasthenia, in psychasthenia, in hysteria and similar regions most effective, in others like paresis or paranoia reduced to an almost insignificant factor. Where it can help and where not we recognize as a mere question of experience.
The "fear of a fear" is indeed a symptom which the psychotherapist has to fight extremely often, but as soon as he has really recognized it and analyzed the whole mental condition, he will hardly have any difficulty in uprooting it. I add a letter of a school-teacher in New York. He writes: "I am teaching in a high school. I am of a nervous temperament and constitutionally limited in endurance.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking