It is really doubtful whether the moral and religious appeals are always
helpful and not sometimes or often even dangerous for the health of the
individual; and it is not doubtful that morally and religiously
indifferent mental influences are often of the highest curative value.
The more we abstract from everything which suggests either the mysticism
of the subconscious or the moral issues of a mind which is independent
of the body, the more we shall be able to answer the question as to the
means by which health can be restored. This question is neither a moral
nor a philosophical one but strictly one of experience. In this
connection, we must remember that we also have had to give up the
artificial demarcation line between organic and functional diseases. We
recognized that every so-called functional disease has its organic basis
too, and that it is entirely secondary whether we are able to find
visible traces of the organic disturbance. We had to acknowledge, to be
sure, the difference between reparable and irreparable disturbances, but
such grouping expresses only in another form the fact that experience
alone can show whether the methods of treatment which we know so far
will be successful or not. Not a few disturbances of the equilibrium
which appeared irreparable to an earlier time yield to the treatment of
to-day, and no one can determine whether much which appears irreparable
today may not be accessible either to psychotherapeutic or to physical
therapeutic means to-morrow. If we were carelessly to identify the
reparable troubles with those which we cannot recognize visibly, we
should be at a loss to understand why, for instance, many forms of
insanity are entirely beyond our psychotherapeutic influences. On the
other hand, every physician who uses psychotherapeutic means is
surprised to see the effective bodily readjustment where serious
disturbances perhaps of the circulatory system or the digestive system
existed. What the methods can do and what they cannot do must simply be
left to experience, but of course to an experience which is eager to
expand itself by ever new experimental curative efforts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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