s not the best adjusted tool, a certain dreamlike
staring may be more effective. We have to return to much of that later
in full detail because just for instance in hysteria, the clear
recognition of the sources and of the character of the disease may at
the same time prove to be in itself the right starting point for
curative treatment.

We have spoken so far only about the relations of psychology and
medicine from the point of view of diagnosis; the relations from the
point of view of therapy will make up the second part of this book. We
shall describe the methods and the results, the possibilities and the
limitations with manifold detail. That is the chief topic of this
volume. All that is needed to prepare for this principal problem is on
the one side a preparatory clearing up of some fundamental conceptions,
especially of those two which have played the chief role in the whole
discussion, namely the subconscious and suggestion. And on the other
side, we may consider at first some fundamental discriminations which
steadily influence the inquiries and controversies in the field. I think
of the difference between normal and abnormal mental states, between
psychical and physical facts in psychotherapy, between functional and
organic diseases, and to return to our starting point, between mental
and moral influences.

Every curative effort presupposes that the normal state of health has
been lost and that a diseased state has set in. Yet the mental analysis
suggests still less than the bodily inquiry, just where the normal
functioning is really lost. It would be easy to draw a demarcation line
if the pathology of the mind introduced any mental features which are
unknown in our normal existence, but the opposite is true. No mental
disease introduces elements which do not occur in the sphere of health.
A degenerated brain cell looks differently under the microscope from a
normal one, but the ideas of a paranoiac, the emotion of a maniac, the
volition of a hysteric, the memory idea of a paralytic is each in its
own structure not different from such elements in any one of us. The
total change lies thus only in the proportion; there is too much or too
little of it. The pathological mental life is like a caricature of a
face--each feature is contained, as in the ordinary portrait, but the
proportion is distorted, there is too much or too little of chin or of
nose. But who can indicate exactly the point where the distortion of