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Psychotherapy
by Hugo Muensterberg
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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. The means of suggestion through education and art, through the church and through public opinion, through example and tradition, and even through fashion and prejudices, are millionfold, but not less numerous are the channels for antisocial and antihygienic suggestions. No one can measure the injury done to the psychophysical balance of the weaker brains, for instance, by the sensational court gossip and reports of murder trials in the newspapers for the masses. But while the influence of suggestion is on the whole familiar to public opinion, the community is much less aware of another factor which we found important in the hands of the psychotherapist. We recognized that mental disturbances were often the result of suppressed emotion and repressed wishes. For the cure the psychotherapist has to aim toward the cathartic result. The suppressed ideas had to be brought to consciousness again and then to be discharged through vivid expression. Society ought to learn from it that few factors are more disturbing for the mental balance than feelings and emotions which do not come to a normal expression. It is no chance that in countries of mixed Protestant and Catholic civilization, the number of suicides is larger in Protestant regions than in the Catholic ones where the confessional relieves the suppressed emotions of the masses. This is also the most destructive effect of social and legal injustice; emotions are strangulated and then begin to work mischief. The community should take care early that secret feelings are avoided, that the child is cured from all sullenness which stores up the emotion instead of discharging it. Certainly all education and social life demands inhibition and also the child has to learn not to give expression to every passing feeling. To find there the sound middle way is again the real hygienic ideal. Too much in our social life and especially in the sphere of sexuality forces on the individual a hypocrisy and secrecy which is among the most powerful conditions of later mental instability.

Of course the background of a hygienic life of the community remains the philosophy of life which gives unity to the scattered energies and consequently steadiness to the individual through all his hazards of fate. It might seem doubtful whether society could get the prescription for such a steady view of the world also from the workshop of the psychotherapist. To the superficial observer the opposite might seem evident, as every word of our psychotherapeutic study indicated that that is a view of life which makes man's inner experience simply an effect of foregoing causes. All life becomes a psychophysical mechanism and from that point of view man's thinking and acting become the necessary outcome of the foregoing conditions. Nothing seems more unfit to give a deeper meaning to life and a higher value. And yet if there was one thought which controlled our discussion from the beginning, it was certainly the conviction that this causal view itself is only an instrument in the service of idealistic endeavors; the reality of man's life is the reality of will and freedom directed towards ideals. One of these ideals is the reconstruction of the world in the thought forms of causality. In the service of our ideals we may thus transform the world into a mechanism: out of our freedom we desire to conceive ourselves as necessary products. Whenever we aim to produce changes in the world, we must calculate the effects through the means of this causal construction, but we never have a right to forget that this calculation itself is therefore only a tool and that our reality, in which our duties and our real aims lie, is itself outside of this construction. The psychotherapist wants to produce effects inasmuch as he wants to cure disease. He is therefore obliged to adjust his work as such entirely to the causal aspect of man, as soon as he wants to seek the means by which he can reach the end. But even the fact that he decides in favor of those ends, that he aims towards their realization, binds him to a world of purposes, and therefore, he, too, with his whole psychophysical work, stands with both feet in a reality of will which is controlled not by causes but by purposes, not by natural laws but by ideals.



INDEX

Abnormal, 75

Abstinence, 281

Action, 34, 101, 276

Adenoids, 189

Adjustment, 102

AEsthetic, 63

Alcohol, 198

Alcoholism, 278

Alternation, 154, 174

Anaemia, 310

Anaesthesia, 174, 301

Analysis, 21

Antagonistic, 24

Anxiety, 272

Appeal, 93

Applied Psychology, 60

Appreciation, 10

Art, 87

Association, 29, 32, 42

Association Experiment, 72, 233, 359

Associationism, 44

Astrology, 350

Assurance, 215

Assyria, 322

Ataxia, 179

Atoms, 27

Attention, 46, 95, 99, 113, 200, 244

Attitudes, 13

Authority, 222

Automatic, 144, 237

Autosuggestion, 122, 172, 219, 255, 266

Awareness, 133, 149

Beauty, 197

Belief, 100, 329

Blood-vessels, 302

Blushing, 262

Braidism, 353

Brain, 29, 34, 67, 139

Cancer, 178

Cathartic, 233, 358

Causality, 14, 32, 57

Cell, 44, 81, 89

China, 321

Church, 319

Christianity, 324

Christian Science, 7, 55, 317, 327, 343, 344

Chronoscope, 71

Circulation, 79

Clairvoyant, 128

Clearness, 103

Cocainism, 283

Coconscious, 156

Communication, 22

Community, 370

Company, 197

Comparative Anatomy, 38

Complex, 232, 249, 270

Confidence, 221, 230

Conscience, 219

Consciousness, 11, 125, 130, 134

Contact, 223

Cortex, 47

Cretinism, 168

Crime, 112

Criminology, 383

Dementia, 168

Depression, 178, 267, 314

Description, 19

Diabetes, 311

Diagnosis, 66, 184, 241

Digestive, 177, 309

Dilettanteism, 2

Discharge, 49, 90, 218, 232, 252, 396

Discipline, 202

Disposition, 138, 143

Dissociation, 135, 152

Dream, 114

Drugs, 163, 334

Education, 389

Effort, 289

Efficiency, 194

Egyptians, 323

Electrobiology, 353

Emmanuel Church, 326, 328, 331, 341

Emotion, 88, 123, 235, 259, 314, 392

Encouragement, 206

Energy, 276, 288

Epidemic, 193

Epilepsy, 80, 207

Equilibrium, 160

Ergograph, 71

Ethics, 16

Ethnology, 329

Examination, 186

Exhaustion, 196

Experimental Psychology, 5, 61

Explanation, 19, 28, 41

Faith, 6, 335

Fascination, 116, 230

Fear, 172, 259, 263

Feeble-minded, 72, 295

Feelings, 23

Freedom, 51, 146

Functional Diseases, 81, 343

Galvanoscope, 71

Genetic Psychology, 39

Gospels, 324

Greeks, 323, 350

Half-sleep, 226

Hallucination, 246

Hastiness, 200

Headache, 309

Hearing, 300

Heart Disease, 310

Heterosuggestion, 122

History, 16

Hygiene, 389

Hypnoid, 116, 227

Hypnotism, 74, 85, 109, 122, 227, 243, 350

Hysteria, 122, 174, 269, 356

Idealism, 2, 33, 397

Illness, 67

Imagination, 111

Impulse, 89

Improvement, 299

Indecision, 290

Indians, 321

Inherited, 171

Inhibition, 86, 95, 113, 295, 305, 315

Insanity, 165, 256

Insomnia, 303, 312

Instinct, 305

Intemperance, 281

Intensity, 194

Interruption, 191

Japan, 322

Jews, 322

Kymograph, 71

Knowledge, 11

Lawyer, 87

Learning, 390

Magnetism, 351

Make-believe, 216

Memory, 138

Mesmerism, 128, 253

Minister, 57, 207, 332, 340, 367

Monotony, 203

Moral, 65, 84

Morality, 372

Morphinism, 283, 376

Motor Process, 46, 97, 218

Movement Sensation, 24

Mystic, 224, 315

Naturalism, 4

Negativism, 220

Nervousness, 193

Neurasthenia, 169, 246, 290, 292

Neuron, 164

Nutrition, 79, 312

Obedience, 201

Object, 13, 18

Obsession, 246

Opposite Idea, 97

Oppression, 272

Organic Diseases, 81, 343

Organism, 23

Pain, 69, 167, 298, 309, 313, 342

Parallelism, 33, 37, 40

Passes, 117

Pathology, 36

Pauses, 190

Pedagogy, 63

Perception, 20, 34, 133

Personality, 11, 25, 154

Persuasion, 214

Perversity, 176

Phobia, 94

Physical, 18

Physician, 57, 347

Physicotherapy, 1

Pneumograph, 71, 235

Poet, 59

Posthypnotic, 120, 231

Postulate, 41

Prayer, 207

Prohibition, 198

Protestantism, 325

Psychasthenia, 172, 264, 277

Psychiatry, 70

Psychical, 18

Psychoanalytic, 236, 272

Psychological Laboratory, 5, 36, 60, 72, 356

Psychology, 5, 8, 25, 39, 364

Pulse, 235, 294

Purposes, 11, 17

Purposive, 13, 33, 65, 145, 338

Reactions, 50, 143

Realism, 2

Reality, 15

Reasoning, 212

Recklessness, 201

Recuperation, 191

Relapse, 281

Relativity, 195

Religion, 84, 207, 329, 341

Reparable, 165

Reservoir, 209

Resistance, 105

Rest, 191

Retardation, 169, 202

Revival, 337

Savages, 320

Secrets, 185

Self, 24, 131

Self-consciousness, 136

Sensation, 22, 28

Sense Organ, 300

Shamanism, 320

Sidetracking, 236, 249, 271

Sleep, 112, 177, 226, 303, 307

Somnambulism, 114, 153, 352

Sphygmograph, 71, 235

Stammering, 175, 274

Stomach, 309

Subconscious, 125, 161

Subcortical, 143, 306

Subject, 13

Suggestibility, 88, 107, 221

Suggestion, 85, 100, 213, 273, 395

Superficiality, 200

Supervision, 279

Surroundings, 189

Sympathy, 205

Symptoms, 80, 186

Temperance, 198

Tones, 44

Toxic, 167

Unity, 52, 135

Vacation, 197

Vividness, 50

Will, 11, 31

Witness, 107

Worry, 259

Yogi, 350



Transcriber's note: Inconsistencies in hyphenation reflect the original text.

THE END

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