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Even the means used for producing mental impressions are physical, impressions made upon some one of the five senses of the individual. In short, as Barker aptly puts it, "Every psychotherapy is also a physical therapy." Furthermore, even mental worry, distress, or depression, in nine cases out of ten has a physical cause.
With such methods anything can be proved, and the most unscrupulous doctrines can be nicely demonstrated. If we are to avoid such logical smuggling, we must see clearly which attitude towards mental life belongs properly to the domain of psychotherapy. But what we have discussed now leaves little doubt as to the necessary decision.
Much of that certainly is indirect influence but the physician would be reckless if he should ignore the aid which may result from such indirect assistance. Even if psychotherapy could not do more in the treatment of bodily diseases than to secure a joyful obedience to the strict demands of the physician, it would yet have to be accredited with an extremely important service.
And in his "Rhapsodies," rhapsodies on the application of psychical methods in the treatment of mental disturbances, he declared, "that the medical Faculties will soon be obliged to add to the two existing medical degrees still a third, namely, the doctorate in psychotherapy."
In cases of nervous prostration this manner of treatment, which demands the serious co-operation and attention of the patient, which lasts a long time and at first takes no notice of the continuance of the phenomena, is difficult. This form of psychotherapy places great demands on the physician's patience and understanding. Psychoanalyses which last more than a year, are no rarity.
It is one of the surest tests of psychotherapeutic skill to discriminate wisely whether one or the other of these features of general treatment ought to be emphasized. They usually demand more insight than specific forms of psychotherapy like hypnotic suggestions.
Probably the most widely held theory is that hypnosis is a transference phenomenon in which the prestige of the hypnotist and his relationship to the subject plays an important role. This theory is bolstered by the fact that all schools of psychotherapy yield approximately the same results even though the methods differ.
A mere mental distraction by enjoyment and play and sport, an æsthetic influence through art, a mere stimulus to automatic imitation, an enforced mental rest, an involuntary discharge of suppressed ideas, and many similar schemes and even tricks of the mental physician belong with the same right to psychotherapy.
Of course a discussion of psychotherapy cannot enter into the study of these physical agencies of treatment, but at the threshold, we have to insist that there exists no opposition between psychophysiological and physiological means of influencing the brain.
Its almost exceptional use in the hands of a few scholarly leaders deprives it of its true importance. It is the village doctor who needs psychotherapy much more than he needs the knife and the electric current. Why does the medical profession on the whole show this shyness in the face of such surprising results?
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