That does not mean that the field in which psychotherapeutics may work
directly on the body is not after all a large and interesting one.
Theoretically it is still little open to real understanding. The
explanation has essentially to rest on the acceptance of a given
physiological apparatus. A certain psychophysical excitement produces by
existing nerve connections a certain effect, for instance, on the
blood-vessels or on the glands of a certain region, or on a certain
lower nervous center. That such apparatus exists, the physiological
experiment with persons who are hypnotized to a high degree can easily
demonstrate. Their nose bleeds at a command; a blister may arise on a
part of the skin which is simply covered with a penny, when the
suggestion is given that the penny is glowing hot. With some subjects,
the pulse can become slower and quicker in accordance with the
suggestion; with some even the bodily temperature can change on order.
Our understanding of these indubitable facts indeed does not go further
than the acknowledgment that the paths for such central connections
exist. That means we simply describe the facts once more in the terms of
anatomy. But after all in the same way we rely on the nervous
connections, if a thought makes us blush and ultimately if our will
moves our arm or if our ideas move our speech apparatus. We do not
choose the muscles of our arm, we hardly know them; we know still less
in speaking, of the movements of our vocal cords, and in blushing of the
dilated blood-vessels. That ideas work on the lower centers of our
central nervous system, centers which regulate the actions of our
muscles and blood-vessels and glands, must simply be accepted as the
machinery of our physiological theory. The connection of such theories
with purely physical facts is given by the experience that an electrical
stimulation of the nerve may have the same influence as ideas. The
electric current, too, can regulate the beat of the heart, or contract
and dilate the vessels, or reenforce and relax the contraction of the
muscles, or strengthen and weaken the functions of the glands.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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