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Updated: June 26, 2025
Wherever a psychical factor enters into the calculations of the physician either by reason of its own abnormality or by its relation as effect or as cause to a diseased part of the body in the brain or without, there we have a psychomedical task, and as far as it is therapeutic, we have psychotherapy.
Some doctors, in order to get at the crisis, have found it useful occasionally to put patients back through one birthday after another right back even as early as their second year, to see at what point in their lives some particular nervous symptom first appeared, and each successive birthday is lived through again in the utmost detail. * * See Psychology and Psychotherapy by Dr. William Brown.
To be sure, the importance of suggestion for psychotherapy is not confined to these suggestive processes of daily life. They play a rôle there, as we shall see, and we shall claim that even the mere presence of the physician may have its suggestive power and so may every remedy which he applies.
It would be an inexcusable narrowness to confine that chapter of applied psychology which is to deal with the psychomedical problems to the work of psychotherapy. Medicine involves diagnosis of illness as well as therapeutics. Between the recognition and the treatment of the illness lies the observation of its development and all this is preceded by steps towards the prevention of illness.
To transform this vagueness into clear, distinct relations is the immediate duty of science. Indeed it may be said that psychotherapy is the last word of a naturalistic age, because psychotherapy finds its real stronghold in a systematic study of the mental laws, and such study of mental laws, psychology, must indeed be the ultimate outcome of a naturalistic view of the world.
Yet we have seen sufficiently that as soon as the symptoms are removed, there is no lack of means, also by psychotherapy, to prevent the recurrence. Moreover, to remove the present symptoms is in any case a great gain and in many cases a decisive gain. And whatever can be secured by such methods is of such a character that hardly any other method could have been substituted.
But here we abstract from the purposive relations. Our attention belongs now to the doctor's dealing with man; for him cause and effect are the only vehicles of connection. Thus he has to exclude the purposive interpretation of inner life and has to understand every factor involved from a psychological point of view: his psychotherapy must be thoroughly applied psychology.
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.
On the whole it may be said that psychotherapy can gain its easiest triumphs in the field of alcoholism and a wide propagation of psychotherapeutic methods and of a thorough understanding of psychotherapy would be fully justified, even if no other field were accessible but that of the desire for alcoholic intemperance.
What the methods can do and what they cannot do must simply be left to experience, but of course to an experience which is eager to expand itself by ever new experimental curative efforts. From this point of view we can see clearly the general division of the whole field of possible psychotherapy. Psychotherapy influences psychophysical states in the interest of health.
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