life interests of which are superior to the interests of the individual.
It is an unavoidable question how far from the higher point of view of
the social mind the psychotherapeutic efforts should be encouraged or
suppressed. Are there any conditions which suggest suspicion of or
direct opposition to such curative work?
Of course society has to be sure that no possible misuse and damage are
to result from such practice. Fears in that direction have been uttered
repeatedly, but from very different standpoints. One which is perhaps
most often heard in popular circles results from an entire
misunderstanding and deserves hardly any discussion after our detailed
study of the processes involved. It is claimed that suggestive power,
especially in the form of hypnotization, may be secretly misused to make
anyone without his knowledge and against his will a passive instrument
of the hypnotist's intent. Often this is coupled with telepathic
fancies. The hypnotist is believed to have mystic power to bring any
person in a distant region under his mental control and thus to be able
to carry out any sinister plans by the help of his innocent victim. All
hypnotizing therefore ought to be interdicted by the state. The
presuppositions of such a view are, as we know now, entirely absurd. We
know that hypnotism is not based on any special power of the hypnotizer;
there is no magnetic fluid in the sense of the old mesmerism. The
imagination of the hypnotized person is the only hypnotizing agency.
Thus no one can be hypnotized without his knowledge or against his will.
The story of telepathic mysteries which is often brought before the
public is probably always the outcome of a diseased brain. It is indeed
a frequent symptom in paranoia and other insanities that the patient who
feels abnormal organic sensations and abnormal unaccountable impulses
interprets them as influences of a distant enemy. Whole pamphlets have
been written with elaboration of such insane misinterpretations and
requests to legislatures have been made in that spirit, but the
physician recognizes easily throughout the whole argumentation the
well-known phenomena of the mental disease.
To be sure, while no one can be hypnotized against his will, many a
person is liable to accept suggestions from others and thus to carry out
the wishes of others almost without knowing and certainly without
willing that the other mind interfere with the interplay of the own
motives. But if we were to strike out all suggestive influences from
social life, we should give up social life itself. Suggestion is given
wherever men come in contact; in itself it is neither good nor bad. The
good resolution and the bad one can be suggested, the good example and
the bad can be effective; both encouragement of the noble and imitation
of the evil may work with the same mental technique. Certainly there are
some persons who have a stronger influence than others on the
imagination of those with whom they come in contact; their expression
awakens confidence, their voice and their words reach deeper layers of
the mind, their calmness and firmness overwhelm more easily the
antagonistic ideas. But the chief difference lies after all in the
different degrees of suggestibility among those who receive such
impressions. The easily suggestible person cannot be protected by any
interdict; he may catch suggestions everywhere, any advertisement in the
newspaper and any display in the shop-window may overrun his own
intentions. What he needs is training in firmness. The application of
reenforced suggestion or even of hypnotism in the doctor's office is
even for him no possible source of danger.
On a higher level are objections which come from serious quarters and
which are not without sympathy with true science. In recent times this
opposition has repeatedly found eloquent expression. It is an objection
from the standpoint of morality, belonging therefore entirely to the
purposive view of the mind, but we have now reached a point where it is
our duty to do justice to this purposive view too. As long as we
discussed the problem entirely from the standpoint of the physician, no
other view of mental life except the causal one could be in question. As
soon as we look at it from the standpoint of the community, it becomes
our duty to bring the causal and the purposive view into harmony, and it
would be narrow and short-sighted simply to draw the practical
consequences of a naturalistic view of the mind without inquiring
whether or not serious interests in the purposive sphere are injured. If
there is moral criticism against suggestive therapy, it is the duty of
the community to consider it. This opposition argues as follows:
Hypnotic influence brings the patient under the will control of the
hypnotizer and thus destroys his own freedom. Whatever the patient may
reach in the altered states is reached without his own effort, while he
is the passive receiver of the other man's will. His achievement has
therefore no moral value, and if he is really cured of his drunkenness
or of his perverse habits, of his misuse of cocaine or of his criminal
tendencies, he has lost the right to be counted a moral agent. It would
be better if there were more suffering in the world than that the
existence of the moral will should be undermined.
No one ought to take such arguments lightly. The spirit which directs
them is needed more than anything else in our time of reaching out for
superficial goods. No one can insist too earnestly that life is worth
living only if it serves moral duties and moral freedom and is not
determined by pleasures and absence of pain only. Those who set forth
this argument are entirely willing to acknowledge the profound effect
which suggestive therapeutics may create. More than this, they have to
acknowledge it to gain a basis for their attack. Just because the
hypnotizer can entirely change the desires and passions, the habits and
perversities of the suffering victim, he seems to them a moral wrongdoer
who negates the principle of human freedom. A forcible book of recent
days calls the suggestive power of the psychotherapist "The Great
Psychological Crime." It says to the hypnotist: "By your own testimony,
you stand convicted of applying a process which deprives your subjects
of the inalienable right and power of individual self-control. In
proportion as you deprive him of the power of self-control, you deprive
him of that upon which his individual responsibility and moral status
depend. In proportion as you deprive him of the free control and
exercise of those powers of the soul upon which his individual
responsibility and moral status depend, you thereby rob him of those
powers upon which he must depend for the achievement of individual
immortality."
But this censure too is entirely mistaken, not because it urges the
purposive views against the causal but because it is in error as to the
facts. Such critics are fully under the influence of the startling
results which are reached; they do not take the trouble to examine the
long and difficult way which has had to be traversed with patience and
energy. It is quite true that if I hypnotize a man and suggest to him to
take up after awaking the book which lies on my table, he follows my
suggestion without conflict and in a certain sense without freedom. He
feels a simple impulse to go to the table and lift the book and, as no
stronger natural desire and no moral objection stand in the way, he
carries out that meaningless impulse and perhaps even invents a foolish
motive to explain to himself why he wanted to look at that book. But
after a long experience, I have my doubts as to whether a man was ever
cured in such a way by hypnotism of serious disturbances and of those
anomalous actions which the critics want to see overcome by the
patient's own moral efforts. On the contrary, every suggestion has to
rely on the efforts and struggles of the patient himself and all that
the psychotherapists can give him is help in his own moral fight. His
own will is presupposition for being hypnotized and for realizing the
suggestion. If again and again I hesitate to undertake new cases, it is
just because I have to see during the treatment too much of this daily
and hourly striving against overpowering impulses. The joy of removing
some obstacles from the way of the patients is too much overshadowed by
the deep pity and sympathy with their suffering and craving during the
whole period of successive treatments. To make a man fight where despair
is inevitable, and where the enemy is necessarily stronger than his own
powers, can certainly not be the moral demand. Morality postulates that
everyone find conditions in which he can be victorious if he puts his
strongest efforts to the task.
In our discussion of the mental symptoms I reported as an illustration
of the suggestive treatment of the drug passion the case of a
morphinist. To make clear this purposive side of the case as against the
causal one which alone interested the physician, I may add a few
features to the short report as a typical example. When that man left my
laboratory for the last time to go out to work and happiness, you might
well have believed from his joyful face that it had been an easy and
pleasant time in which hypnotic influence smoothly removed from him the
dangerous desire for morphine. In truth it was the result of four months
of the most noble and courageous suffering and struggling. He had been
for years a slave to his passion. To quote from his little
autobiography: "When I realized that I was addicted to morphine, I was
at first not at all worried as I did not then understand the real horror
of the thing, and did not then realize all the future suffering and
misery that is coming to anyone who is the user of opium or any of its
alkaloids. For the first few months, I found great relief after every
injection of morphine, but soon I could not get the same easy feeling
and could eat but very little and what sleep I got was in the daytime. I
finally went to the sanitarium of a doctor but it was simply a
money-making business for him; if he ever cured anyone, I never heard of
it. I then tried another one; it was the same kind of a place as the
former. When I first went to see the professor in the Harvard
Psychological Laboratory, I was using between thirty-two and
thirty-eight grains of morphine daily. He put me under his treatment
October 6th and that day cut me down by hypnotic treatment to nine
grains a day or three doses of three grains a day. I took my hypodermic
as directed, but on the following day I lay on the bed too exhausted to
get up even to get around the room, and I could not eat and only drank a
very little water. The desire for the drug was something terrible. But
in about four days I got used to the loss of so much morphine and stayed
on this amount for a week, seeing the professor every other day for
hypnotic treatment and then returning to my room where I spent
twenty-two hours of the twenty-four on the bed, but did not sleep more
than two or three hours a day. At the end of the week I was cut off by
hypnotic suggestion half a grain and this put me to fighting the desire
again. This lasted two or three days and then I began to feel better and
began to sleep a little more. But at the end of the week I was cut off
another half grain, and the whole fight would have to be begun over.
These reductions of the dose were made a week apart and sometimes only
two days. The worst time of all was a cut from four injections of a
fourth of a grain each to four of one eighth of a grain each, which was
about January 10th. At this time I had the worst two days of my life. I
tried whiskey, but it gave relief only for about half an hour and then
the desire was worse than ever."
In this way every few days I gave the poor fellow under hypnotic
influence the suggestion to reduce the dose of morphine in a prescribed
way, and with enormous effort he withstood his craving for more, in
spite of the fact that he had during all this winter a bottle with a
thousand tablets of morphine, prescribed by an unscrupulous physician,
in his writing desk. He was thus at every moment during the day and
night in full possession of the deadly poison with which he could have
fully satisfied his craving. It was a moral victory when he finally
reached the point at which he went for several weeks without any desire
for morphine and finally presented the remaining tablets to a hospital.
And yet there would not have been the least chance for his winning this
ethical victory without the outer help of the hypnotist. We do not
eliminate the moral will but we remove some unfair obstacles from its
path. We have no mystic power by which our will simply takes hold of the
other man's will, but we inhibit and suppress by influence on the
imagination those abnormal impulses which resist the sound desires. If
that were immoral, we should have to make up our minds that all
education and training were perverted with such immoral elements. Every
sound respect for authority which makes a child willing to accept the
advice and maxims of his elders is just such an influence. If it were
really a moral demand that the will be left to its own resources and
that no outside influence come to strengthen its power or remove its
hindrances or smooth its path, then we ought to let the children grow up
as nature created them and ought not to try to suppress from without by
discipline and training, by love and encouragement, the willful
impulses and the ugly habits. Even every good model for imitation is
such a suggestive influence from without and every solemn appeal to
loyalty and friendship, to patriotism and religion, increases the degree
of suggestibility. That is the glory of life that the suggestive power
may belong to moral values instead of mere pleasures, but it is not the
aim of life to remain untouched by suggestion. And he who by suggestion
helps the weak mind to overcome obstacles which the strong mind can
overthrow from its inborn resources works for the good of the individual
and of the community in the spirit of truest morality.
Much more justified than such ethical objections are the fears which
move entirely in the causal sphere. It must be acknowledged that a
method which has such powerful influence over the mind that it can
secure ideas and emotions and impulses which the own will of the patient
cannot produce, ought to be allowed only to those who are prepared for
its skillful use. To hypnotize or to perform any persistent
psychotherapeutic treatment may thus be dangerous, if it is done by the
unfit. We have discussed before the injuries which might result from the
administration of such powerful psychotherapeutic effects through the
best meaning minister, but we can extend this fear to anyone who has not
systematically studied medicine and to a certain degree normal and
abnormal psychology. The possibilities of overlooking symptoms which
ought to suggest an entirely different treatment, or of adjusting the
treatment badly to the special physical conditions, or of ignoring the
desirable physical supplement by drugs, or of creating unintentionally
by suggestion injurious effects, are always open when medical amateurs
undertake such work. Certainly there is no physician who is not liable
to make mistakes, and a physician who has never given any attention to
psychology and psychiatry would also be a rather poor agent of
psychotherapeutic methods, but the probability is that such a physician
would simply abstain by principle from all psychotherapeutic methods;
his mistake only begins if from his lack of acquaintance with the
subject he draws the conclusion that the method itself is undesirable.
That his real preparation ought to include psychological studies we have
pointed out before, and the time seems ripe for the community to urge
such a reform of the studies.
All that involves the conviction that even the experimental psychologist
as such is not prepared to enter into medical treatment; and a
"Psychological Clinic," managed by a psychologist who is not a doctor of
medicine, is certainly not better than a church clinic. I cannot even
acknowledge the right of psychologists to make hypnotic experiments
merely for the psychological experiment's sake. Nobody ought to be
brought into a hypnotic or otherwise abnormal state of mind if it is not
suggested by the interests of the subject himself. Science has the right
to make hypnotic experiments, or experiments with abnormal mental
states, only under the one condition that a physician has hypnotized the
subject in the interests of his health and that the patient has agreed
beforehand to allow in the presence of witnesses certain psychological
studies. Needless to say that any hypnotization for mere amusement and
as a parlor trick ought to be considered as criminal.
On some other objections which interest the community as such we had to
touch before, and there is no need of returning to them with any
fullness of argument. We spoke of the danger which the mental cures
carry with them when they are based on any particular creed, and
especially when they are tied up with a semi-religious arbitrary
metaphysics. What is gained if some nervous disorders are helped by
belief, if the belief itself devastates our intellectual culture and
brings the masses down again to a view of the world which has all the
earmarks of barbarism? That is indeed one of the central dangers of all
non-medical suggestive cures, that while any belief may cure through the
mere emotional power of the act of believing, the content of the belief
gains an undeserved appearance of truth. Any absurd superstition can
become accredited because its curative value may be equal to a truly
valuable suggestion. The intellectual life of the community would have
to suffer greatly if the way to be freed from bodily suffering had to be
the belief in the metaphysical doctrines of Mrs. Eddy's "Science and
Health." From a cultural viewpoint, too, suggestive therapeutics must
stand the higher, the more sharply it is separated from special
philosophical or religious doctrines. No theory of the world and of God
ought to gain authority over the mind from such an external motive as a
belief in its curative effects. Freest from such implications is
certainly the hypnotic method of the physician who does not need the
strong religious reenforcement of the suggestion because he reenforces
instead the suggestibility of the patient by slight influences on his
senses.
Even where sound religion without superstition and without
pseudophilosophy stands behind the therapeutic work, the community will
not give up the question whether the church does not necessarily neglect
by it the interests which are superior. The community becomes more and
more strongly aware that too many factors of our modern society urge the
church to undertake non-religious work. Social aid and charity work
ought to be filled with religious spirit, but to perform it is not
itself religion. Still more that is true of the healing of the sick.
Whether or not such expansion of church activity in different directions
saps the vital strength of religion itself is indeed a problem for the
whole community. The fear suggests itself that the spiritual achievement
may become hampered, that in the competition of the church with the
other agencies of social life the particular church task may be pushed
to the background, and that thus the church in imitating that which
others can do just as well or better loses the power to do that which
the church alone can do. The final outcome is therefore practically in
every way the same. From whatever starting point we may come, we are led
to the conviction that the physician alone is called to administer
psychotherapeutic work, but that he needs a thorough psychological
training besides his medical one.
But the interest of the community is not only a negative one. Society
does not only ask where psychical treatment can be dangerous, but asks
with not less right whether the scheme and the method might not be
fructified for other social ends besides the mere healing of the sick.
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. Both
educators and criminologists have indeed often raised such questions,
and social reformers have not seldom seen there wide perspectives for
social movements in future times.
There can be no doubt that the possibility of such remodeling activity
is given, but as far as education is concerned certainly grave
misgivings ought to be felt. When we spoke of the treatment of the sick,
we had always to emphasize that the suggestion cures symptoms but not
diseases. In the same way hypnotic suggestion might reenforce a single
trait but would not reform the personality of the child. Yes, the
artificial reenforcement of such special features would deprive
education of that which is the most essential, namely, the development
of the power to overcome difficulties by own energy. Wherever a
reasonable amount of own will force and attention can be expected to
overcome the antagonistic influence, there artificial hypnotic
influence ought to be avoided. Everything ought to be left in that case
to suggestions within normal limits, in the form of good example and
persuasions, authority and discipline, love and sympathy. That holds
true even for very slight abnormalities which seem still within the
limits where the own energies can bring about the cure. For instance, I
have steadily refused requests of students and others to use hypnotism
for the purpose of overcoming merely bad habits, such as the habit of
biting the nails. A child who finds some difficulty in sticking
seriously to his tasks might learn now this and now that under the
influence of hypnotic suggestions but he would remain entirely untrained
for mastering the next lesson. In the same way some naughty traits might
be artificially removed but the child would not gain anything towards
the much more important power of suppressing an ugly tendency by his own
effort. All that finds its limits where the inhibitions or obstacles in
the brain of the child are too strong possibly to be overcome by the own
good will, but in that case we already stand in the field of abnormal
mental life and then of course psychotherapy has its right. The
feeble-minded and the retarded child, the perverse child and the
emotionally unstable child, belong under the care of the physician, and
in such a case he ought not to hesitate to use the whole supply of
psychotherapeutic methods which are at his disposal.
Still more complex is the criminological problem. It sounds like an easy
remedy for the greatest social calamity, if it is proposed simply to
hypnotize the criminal and to supplant his antisocial will by a moral
one. And if the absurdity of such a proposal is recognized it seems to
many justified to demand such an intrusion at least in the case of the
born criminal, even if the occasional criminal cannot be reached. But
the conception of the born criminal is also only a label which is
superficially used for a great variety of minds. That men are born with
a brain which necessarily produces criminal actions is not indicated by
any facts. The varieties which nature really produces are brains which
are more liable than others to produce antisocial actions. We recognized
from the start that the abnormal mind never introduces any new elements
but is characterized only by a change of proportions. There is too much
or too little of a certain mental process and just for that reason there
must be a steady and continuous transition from the normal to the
entirely abnormal. Here again we have not a special class of brains
which are criminal; but we have an endless variety of brains with a
greater or smaller predisposition for antisocial outbreaks. The
variations which produce this criminal effect may lie in most different
directions.
The brain may be for instance inclined to overstrong impulses, so that
any desire rushes to action before the inhibiting counter-idea gets to
work. Or, on the other hand, the brain may have unusually weak
counter-ideas so that even a normal impulse does not find its normal
checking. The fact that selfish and thus antisocial desires awake in the
mind is not abnormal at all; only if they are not normally inhibited,
the disturbance sets in. Furthermore the associative apparatus of the
brain may work especially slowly; it may thus bring it about that the
counteracting ideas do not arise in time. Or the emotions of a person
may be unusually strong. Or there may be strong suggestibility, by which
a bad example or a strong temptation has especially easy access. Or
there may be negative suggestibility, by which a moral admonition stirs
up a vivid idea of the opposite. In short, there may be a large number
of factors, sometimes even in combination, each one of which increases
the chances that the individual may come in danger in the midst of
developed society. Yet no one of those factors involves just the
necessity of crime. The same kinds of brains might simply show stupidity
or credulity or inconsiderateness or brutality or stubbornness or
egotism, and might by each of those factors decrease their chances in
the community without directly running into conflict with the law. The
criminal is therefore never born as such. He is only born with a brain
which is in some directions inefficient and which thus, under certain
unfavorable conditions, will more easily come to criminal deeds than the
normal brain.
With the idea of a stereotyped born criminal there disappears also the
idea of a uniform treatment against criminal tendencies. That men are
different in their power of resistance or in their power of efficiency
or in their intellect or in their emotions, we have to accept as the
fundamental condition with which every society starts. It would be
absurd to remodel them artificially after a pattern. The result would be
without value anyhow, inasmuch as our appreciation is relative. No
character is perfect. The more the differences were reduced, the more we
should become sensitive even for the smaller variations. All that
society can do is, therefore, not to remodel the manifoldness of brains,
but to shape the conditions of life in such a way that the weak and
unstable brains also have a greater chance to live their lives without
conflicts with the community.
The situation is different as soon as the particular surroundings have
brought it about that such a brain with reduced powers has entered a
criminal career. The thought of crime now becomes a sort of obsession or
rather an autosuggestion. The way to this idea has become a path of
least resistance, and as soon as such an unfortunate situation has
settled itself, the chances are overwhelming that a criminal career has
been started. If such cases should come early to suggestive treatment
which really would close the channels of the antisocial autosuggestion,
much harm might be averted. Yet again the liability of the brain to
become antisocial would not have been removed, and thus not much would
be secured unless such a person after the treatment could be kept under
favorable conditions. With young boys who through unfortunate influence
have caught a tendency, for instance, to steal, and where the fault does
not yield to sympathetic reasoning and to punishment, an early hypnotic
treatment might certainly be tried. I myself have seen promising
results. But if the impulse has irresistible character in such a way
that the good will is powerless, we are again in the field of disease
and the point of view of the physician has to be substituted for that of
the criminologist.
Whether pedagogy and criminology are to make use of the services of
psychotherapy is thus certainly an open question. It would be
short-sighted to overlook the serious obstacles which stand in the way.
But while the social life outside of the circle of real disease may
better go on without direct interference by psychotherapeutic
influences, it is certainly the duty of the community to make the
underlying principles of psychotherapy useful for the sound development
of society. The artificial over-suggestions which are needed to overcome
the pathological disturbances of mental equilibrium may be left for the
cases of illness. But we saw that every mental symptom of disease was
only an exaggeration of abnormal variations which occurred within the
limit of health. To reduce these abnormalities means to secure a more
stable equilibrium and thus to avoid social damages, and at the same
time to prevent the growth of the abnormality to pathological
dimensions. To counteract these slighter variations, these abnormalities
which have not yet reached the degree of disease, will demand the same
principles of treatment, only in a weaker form. It is in a way not
psychical therapy but psychical hygiene. And this is no longer confined
to the physician but must be intrusted to all organs of the community.
And here more than in the case of disease, the causal point of view of
the physician ought to be brought into harmony with the purposive view
of the social reformer, of the educator and of the moralist.
The ideal of such mental hygiene is the complete equilibrium of all
mental energies together with their fullest possible development. To
work towards this end does not mean to aim towards the impossible and
undesirable end of making all men alike, but to give to all, in spite of
the differences which nature and society condition, the greatest
possible inner completeness and outer usefulness. The efforts in that
direction have to begin with the earliest infancy and are at no age to
be considered as finished; the whole school work and to a high degree
the professional work has to be subordinated to such endeavor. Society
has further to take care that those spheres of life which stand less
under systematic principles, such as the home life of the child and the
social life of the man, his family life and his public life, are
steadily under the pressure of influences which urge in the same
direction.
Harmonious development without one-sidedness, and yet with full justice
to the individual talents and equipments, should be secured. That means
from the start an effort to secure balance between general education and
particular development. The latter has to strengthen those powers by
which the boy or girl by special natural fitness promises to be
especially efficient and happy. It has to be supplemented later by a
wise and deliberate choice of such a vocation as brings these
particular abilities most strongly to a focus. Yet this alone would mean
a one-sidedness in which the equilibrium would be lost. More important,
it would leave undeveloped that power which the youth especially needs
to acquire by serious education, the power to master what does not
appeal to the personal likings and interests. An equilibrium is secured
only if at the same time full emphasis is given to the learning and
training in all which is the common ground of our social existence. From
the multiplication table to the highest cultural studies in college, the
youth is to be adjusted to the material of our civilization without any
concession to the emasculating desire to adjust civilization simply to
the particular youth. He has to learn learning and not only to play with
knowledge, he has to learn to force his attention in adjustment to those
factors of civilization which are foreign to his personal tendencies and
perhaps unsympathetic. Free election of life's work and unyielding
mental discipline in the service of the common demands should thus
steadily cooeperate. The one without the other creates a lack of mental
balance which is the most favorable condition for a pathological
disturbance.
The mere learning is of course on both sides only a fraction of what the
community has to develop in the youth. Mental hygiene begins with
physiological hygiene. The nourishment of the child, the care for the
child's sense organs, the recesses and the rest from fatigue, and
especially the undisturbed sleep are essential conditions. The
interferences with sufficient sleep are to a high degree responsible
for the later disturbances of the mental life. It must not be forgotten
that the decomposition of the brain molecules can never be restituted by
anything but rest, and ultimately by sleep. Physical exercise is
certainly not such restitution. In the best case it brings a certain
rest to some brain centers by engaging other brain parts. The child
needs sleep and fresh air and healthful food more than anything else, if
his mind is active. The careful examination of the sense organs and of
the unhindered breathing through the nose is most important. Even a
slight defect in hearing may become the cause of an under-development of
attention.
More important than mere physical hygiene is the demand that a sound
character and a sound temperament are also to be built up, at the side
of a sound interest. Here again everything depends upon a wise balance
between the development of that which is given by nature to the
particular individual and the reenforcement of that which society
demands and which belongs therefore to the common equipment. The
emotional stability and emotional enlargement of the mind is perhaps
most neglected in our educational schemes. On the one side it demands a
systematic discipline of the emotions, on the other a healthy
stimulation of emotions. Here is the place where imagination in play and
later in art come in. The biological value of play always lies in the
training for the functions of later life, and especially for the
emotional functions. The play of our children is too little adjusted to
this task. For this reason it leaves too many unprepared for the world
of art and for the emotional experiences of real life. Both lack of
emotional discipline and narrow one-sidedness of emotions interfere with
the harmonious development. Destructive emotions like terror ought to be
kept away and not needlessly brought near by uncanny stories and mystic
superstitions. It is the healthy love and sympathy of the home which
contributes most strongly to the normal development of emotions. Again
in the field of will, we want the strong, spontaneous, independent will
which is not frightened by discomfort and not discouraged by obstacles,
and yet we want the will which is not stubborn and selfish but which
subordinates itself to the larger will of the social group and to the
eternal will of the norm. There is no balance where independence and
subordination do not supplement each other. A wide education not only
trains for both but also secures habits which work as autosuggestions in
both directions.
But all this harmonious development of intellect and temperament and
character has to go on when the school days are over and just here
begins the duty of the community as a whole. The special functions of
the teachers have to be taken up by the public institutions. The whole
social life must shape itself in such a way that everyone finds the best
possible chances to perfect this harmonious growth. In the field of the
intellect, the community must take care that thoroughness of training
and accuracy of information is rigidly demanded and not thrust out by
an easy-going superficiality. The expert ought to replace the amateur in
every field. Every society which allows successes to superficiality
diminishes its chances for mental health. Yet while thoroughness demands
concentration in one direction, society must with the same earnestness
insist on well-rounded general education and continuity of general
interests through life. Literature and the libraries, the newspapers and
the magazines play there a foremost role, and again the mental health of
the community has to pay the penalty if its newspapers work against
general culture. In the emotional field art and music, fiction and the
theater on the one side, the church on the other side, remain the great
schools for a development of sound emotions. Where literature becomes
trivial, where the stage becomes degraded, and where the church becomes
utilitarian and uninspiring, great powers for possible good in emotional
education are lost. But with this enrichment of feelings the
disciplinary influence too has to go through the whole social life.
Where art is sensational and the church hysterical,--in short, where the
community stirs up overstrong feelings,--the wholesome balance is lost
again. In a similar way the public demands should throughout stimulate
the energy and ambitions and initiative of the man, and yet should keep
his desires and impulses in control.
Few factors are more influential in all these directions than the
administration of law. Sound sober lawmaking and fair judgment in court
secure to the community a feeling of safety which gives stability to
emotions and feelings. The disorganization which results from arbitrary
laws, from habitual violation of laws, from corruption and injustice
works like a poison on the psychophysical system. A similar unbalancing
influence emanates from overstrong contrasts of poverty and comfort. A
poverty which discourages and leaves no chances and a wealth which
annihilates the energies and effaces the consciousness of moral
equality, create alike pernicious conditions for mental balance.
Unlimited furthermore are the influences which depend upon the sexual
ideas of the society. It is the sphere in which it may be most difficult
to indicate the way towards a development without dangers. There is no
doubt the arbitrary suppression of the sexual instinct must be
acknowledged as the source of nervous injury while indulgence may lead
to disease and misery. But in any case frivolous habits and easy divorce
contribute much to the unbalanced life which ruins the unstable
individual. Not less difficult and not less connected with the mental
hygiene is the alcohol problem. For normal adult men mild doses have
through their power to relieve the inhibitions undeniable value for the
sound development of the community. Its intemperate use or its use by
young people and by pathological persons is one of the gravest dangers.
Whether intemperance ought to be fought by prohibition or rather by an
education to temperance is a difficult question in which the
enthusiastic women and ministers, backed by the well justified fears of
psychiatrists, will hardly be on the same side as the sober judgment of
scientists, unprejudiced physicians, and historians. In any case the
saloon and its humiliating indecency must disappear and every temptation
to intemperance should be removed. Above all, from early childhood the
self-control has to be strengthened, the child has to learn from the
beginning to know the limits to the gratification of his desires and to
abstain from reckless over-indulgence. With such a training later on
even the temptations of alcoholic beverages would lose their danger. Not
less injurious than the strong drinks are the cards. All gambling from
the child's play to the stock exchange is ruinous for the psychophysical
equilibrium. The same is true of any overuse of coffee and tea and
tobacco, and as a matter of course still more the habitual use of the
drugs like the popular headache powders and sleeping medicines. The life
at home and in public ought to be manifold and expansive but ought to
avoid over-excitement and over-anxiety. 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. 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. |
+----------------------------------------------------+