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The soul, as spiritual agency in its sphere of purposes and ideals, does not enter the machinery of psychotherapy, and the psychological material on which psychotherapy is applied is not freer and not better and does not stand higher than the material of the bodily cells and tissues.
Thus to believe in psychotherapy ought never to mean that we have a right to make light of the other means which, as experience shows, may help towards the treatment of disturbances in the central equilibrium. Suggestions and bromides together may secure an effect which neither of them alone will bring about.
Psychotherapy is the practice of treating the sick by influencing the mental life. It stands at the side of physicotherapy, which attempts to cure the sick by influencing the body, perhaps with drugs and medicines, or with electricity or baths or diet. Psychotherapy is sharply to be separated from psychiatry, the treatment of mental diseases.
Thus suggestibility is really a practical factor in every walk of life. And it is in the highest interests of psychotherapy that this intimate connection between suggestion and ordinary talk and intercourse, between suggestion and ordinary choice of motives, between suggestion and attention be steadily kept in view and that suggestion is not transformed into a kind of mysterious agency.
Psychotherapy has suffered too much from the usual confusion of standpoints. Psychotherapy has now become for us the effort to repair the disturbed equilibrium of human functions by influencing the mental life. It is acknowledged on all sides that the most powerful of these influences is that of suggestion.
The restoration of lost memories by means of suggestion the synthesis of the dissociated states this is the key to the mystery, the great secret of modern psychotherapy. And this theory of dissociation of consciousness has enabled us to explain many puzzling facts hitherto inexplicable.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, they are still on the whole thrown together with the criminals but the more the disease character of the disturbance is acknowledged, and the more special hospitals for the insane are created, and finally the more the humane treatment in them supersedes the brutal, the more psychotherapy enters into the work. England showed the way.
Yet we must insist that the right entrance to psychotherapy is missed if the difference between morality and mentality is not clearly recognized from the beginning. The confusion of the two harms every statement. To avoid such a fundamental mistake, we had to take the long way around and to examine carefully what psychology really means and what it does not mean.
Moreover the suggestion may have been detached from any personality and may have belonged to any symbol of religious energies, like the relics of the Catholic Church. Even the most skeptical of ethnologists ought to acknowledge that very little in this history of religious psychotherapy points to a conscious fraud.
Instructorships in abnormal psychology must be created in every medical school; institutes for psychotherapy should soon follow. But in all this, there is nowhere to appear any artificial antithesis between mind and body, any more than between organic and functional diseases; we have discussed all that with full detail.
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