Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 26, 2025
He wore a lemon-coloured vest and lemon-yellow spats. "How d'you do?" he said, gazing at me out of those queer eyes of his. "I hear that you admire my work." "You have been misinformed," I replied. "Your work interests me, because I am a student of nervous and mental diseases." "Ah. Psychotherapy." "All of the characters in your poem, 'The Vision of Helen, are neurotics.
If psychotherapy employs all the means by which we can influence mental states in the interest of the health of the personality, we have no reason to confine it either to a persuasion of the subconscious through suggestion and hypnotism or a persuasion of the conscious, in which it works as a moral appeal.
The stories of the miracles have technical terms and are in a language adorned by medical phraseology, but the mental attitude towards disease is certainly not that of a follower of Hippocrates, nor even of a scientifically trained contemporary of Dioscorides. Psychotherapy, New York, 1919, p. 79, "I am convinced that miracles happen there. There is more than natural power manifest."
In other fields they do not show any reluctance in taking up the newer developments of method. Even the Roentgen ray apparatus has quickly won its way, and psychotherapy is less expensive. To be sure, the most important reason is probably one which is most honorable. The physicians do not like to touch a tool which has been misused so badly.
Now modern psychotherapy finds that the entire disturbances which arise from such emotional disagreeable experiences, forgotten or not forgotten, can often be removed by psychical means. Two ways in particular seem open. As soon as the idea is fully brought back to consciousness again, the patient must be made to express the primary emotion with full intensity.
As a matter of course, I also leave out everything which refers to insanity, that is, every mental disturbance which lies essentially outside of the domain of psychotherapy. The helpful influence which psychical factors can exert in the asylums for the insane is, as we emphasized, entirely secondary.
In addition to all this, the medicine-man possessed much personal magnetism and authority, and in his treatment often sought to reestablish the equilibrium of the patient through mental or spiritual influences a sort of primitive psychotherapy. The Sioux word for the healing art is "wah-pee-yah," which literally means readjusting or making anew.
If psychotherapy demonstrates that for instance hypnotism makes possible the reshaping of a pathological mind, it is a natural thought to use the same power for remodeling perhaps the lazy or the intemperate, the careless or the inattentive, the dishonest or the criminal mind.
Yet the influence of these movements on the medical world remained insignificant until a new great wave of psychotherapeutics by means of suggestion began in France in the sixties. Of course this development from astrology to magnetism and from magnetism to hypnotism represented only one side of psychotherapy. Parallel to it goes the progress in the treatment of the insane.
The realistic conviction that even the mind is completely controlled by natural laws and the idealistic inspiration that the mind of man has in its freedom mastery over the body, are thus most curiously mixed in the popular psychotherapy of the day, and too few recognize that the real meaning of mind is an entirely different one in these two propositions.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking