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Updated: June 26, 2025
I, for one, raise my voice in protest against the tide of intellectual asceticism which is inclined to accept without question the modern doctrine and methods of "psychotherapy" and mind-cure in place of the more rational and certain measures of hygiene and medicine. The further a pendulum swings in one direction, the further will it swing in the other, when released.
A good conscience, a congenial home, and a serious purpose are after all the safest conditions for a healthy mind, and the community works in preventive psychotherapy wherever it facilitates the securing of these three factors. For that end society may take over directly from the workshop of the psychotherapist quite a number of almost technical methods. Suggestion is one of them.
We enter now that region of constitutional disturbances in which psychotherapy is of small help. It leads from epilepsy to the periodic diseases, especially the maniacal depressive insanity, the paranoia which develops late, and finally to states of idiocy which cover the whole life.
We are far from claiming that psychical influences are entirely powerless, the more as we insisted that psychotherapy goes much beyond mere suggestions and appeals. No psychiatrist will work without psychological tools when he deals with the exultations of the maniac and the depressions of the melancholic, with the hallucinations of persecution or the erotic insanities of the paranoiac.
Incomparably small, on the other hand, is the aid which psychotherapy can offer in cases of real destructions in the brain, as in the case of tumors, hemorrhage, paresis or the degeneration by senility. More effective may be its work in concussion of the brain and especially with traumatic neuroses, as in the case when a railroad accident has put the mind-brain system out of gear.
The "shaman" was therefore the first medicine man, the first witch doctor, the first physician. He relied chiefly upon psychotherapy as does the modern witch doctor of Christian Science. Medicine could not begin to be medicine until it was disassociated from magic, religion, and theology. This struggle has been going on from the time of the "shaman" to the present moment.
Both schools must have the tendency to extend psychotherapy at the expense of bodily therapy and to narrow down psychotherapy itself to a therapy by appeals which in the one case are suggestions to the subconscious and in the other case persuasions and encouragements to the conscious will.
It is the foreconscious that accomplishes this work; and the only course to be pursued by psychotherapy is the subjugate the Unc, to the domination of the Forec. There are, therefore, two exits for the individual unconscious emotional process.
Diagnosis and observation have to precede, and an inquiry into the causes of the disease is essential, and in every one of these steps psychology may play its rôle. The means of psychodiagnostic are not less manifold than those of psychotherapy. Moreover there the technique may be more complex and subtle. The whole equipment of the modern laboratory ought to be put at its disposal.
It may be true that drugs and baths and electricity have no influence on the subconscious, but the trouble is not that the drugs are inefficient but that they cannot influence what does not exist. In the same way disappears now that new boundary line for psychotherapy which wants to limit it to mere suggestion and appeal.
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