Psychotherapy: Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of Disease — John Shaqi
Psychotherapy: Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of DiseaseWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Science
Psychotherapy: Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of Disease
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Mental healing
Among the Egyptians the first great development of medicine came among
the priests. The two professions, the medical and priesthood, were
one, and the temples were the hospitals of the time. We have stories
of people traveling long distances to certain temples in the early
days of Egypt and also of Greece. Often the sick slept in the temples
and dreamed of ways by which they would be cured. The stories make one
feel that somehow the sleep which came over them was not entirely
natural and spontaneous, but must have been something like hypnotic
sleep. As for the dreams, the suggestions of modern time given in the
hypnotic condition seem to be the best indication that we have of what
happened in those old days. Certain it is that the persuasion of the
patient that he would get better, the influence of the diversion of
mind consequent upon his journey and the regulation of life under new
circumstances in the temple, with the repeated suggestions of the
priests and of their various remedial measures, as well as those due
to the fact that other patients around him were improving, all plainly
show the place of psychotherapy at this time.
Much of the old-time therapy was in association with dreams supposed
to have been in some way inspired. This was true at Epidaurus, at Kos,
at Rome, at Lebene, at Athens, and at every place we know of where
cures were worked in the olden times. To the modern mind it seems
impossible that dreams should come so apropos unless they were in some
way directed. The only explanation seems to be the use of suggestion,
with the probable production of sleep resembling our modern hypnotic
trance. Apparently the patient's attention was little directed to the
origin of the suggestions received, but he remembered and benefited by
them.
The most explicit testimony that we have to the antiquity of
psychotherapeutics and to the employment of the influence of the minds
of patients over their ailments in the olden time is in Pinel's
"Nosographie philosophique" and in his "Traite medico-philosophique
sur l'alienation mentale."
Pinel himself will be remembered as the great French psychiatrist who,
confident that he could control most of them by mental influence,
first dared to strike the chains from the insane in the asylums of
Paris, at the end of the eighteenth century, when for more than a
century they had been treated more barbarously than ever before in
history. The passage makes clear that the writer himself, over a
hundred years ago, was persuaded of the significance of the patient's
mental attitude and of the value of mental treatment for many nervous
and mental diseases:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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