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
Under the head of Adjuvants and Disturbing Factors in the psychic
treatment of patients come the various phases of life which make for
and against such a favorable state of mind as predisposes to the
continuance of good health, minimizes inhibition, and adds to
favorable suggestion. By modifying the modes of life, an ever renewed
set of suggestions is initiated. By definite instruction and advice
with regard to exercise, position, training, habit, pain, occupation
of mind and diversion of mind, patients may be profoundly influenced,
and gradually made to take on an entirely new attitude of mind towards
themselves. These chapters, then, while apparently much more concerned
with physiotherapy than psychotherapy, are really directions for the
use of such physical methods as by frequent repetition make the most
valuable suggestions. There is probably nothing more valuable in the
ordinary application of psychotherapy than these various auxiliaries,
with their power to remove disturbing factors, while, on the other
hand, nothing aids more in bringing relief for many conditions than
the removal of certain disturbing factors.
There is now a general recognition of the fact that suggestion in the
waking state can in most cases be as therapeutically efficient as
hypnotism, and is probably even more enduring in its effects when
successful, without the dangers and sequelae connected with hypnosis.
_Every idea tends to act itself out_. When we crave something, when
there are active ideas of desire, there usually are movements of our
flexor muscles. These affect the hands especially. At moments of
hatred, detestation or abhorrence our extensor muscles are affected,
as if we would wave these things away from us. There may even be an
involuntary turning of the trunk muscles, as if we would no longer
face what is abhorrent, though the repulsive thing may be present only
to the mind. It is not far-fetched to argue that, since the voluntary
function of muscles is thus influenced, other functions are also
touched by emotions, ideas, trains of thought, especially when the
mind is much concentrated on them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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