Psychotherapy - Hugo Münsterberg (top 5 books to read txt) 📗

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 rôle, 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 Æsthetic, 63 Alcohol, 198 Alcoholism, 278 Alternation, 154, 174 Anæmia, 310 Anæsthesia, 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,