lls through the sense organs and which we call psychical under one
aspect, but which certainly remain physiological influences from another
aspect. And these psychophysiological influences of the spoken words or
similar agencies are thus indeed for therapeutic effect entirely
cooerdinated with the douche and the bath and the electric current and
the opiate. It is a stimulation of certain brain cells, an inhibition of
certain others: a subtle apparatus which must be handled with careful
calculation of its microscopical causes and effects. That these words
from an entirely different point of view may mean a moral appeal and
have ethical value, point to moral and religious ideas and reenforce the
spiritual personality, lies entirely outside of the psychotherapeutic
calculation. As long as the curing of the patient is the aim, the faith
in God is not more valuable than the faith in the physician and the
moral appeal of no higher order than the influence through the galvanic
current. They come in question only as means to an end and they are
valuable only in so far as they reach the end. That they can be related
to an entirely different series of purposes, to the system of our moral
ideas, ought not to withdraw the attention of the psychotherapist from
his only aim, to cure the patient. The highest moral appeal may be even
a most unfit method of treatment and the religious emotion may just as
well do harm as good from the point of view of the physician.
Psychotherapy has suffered too much from the usual confusion of
standpoints.

V

SUGGESTION AND HYPNOTISM

Psychotherapy has now become for us the effort to repair the disturbed
equilibrium of human functions by influencing the mental life. It is
acknowledged on all sides that the most powerful of these influences is
that of suggestion. This is an influence which is most easily
misunderstood and which has most often become the starting point for
misleading theories. Before we enter into the study of the practical
effects of suggestion and the psychotherapeutic results, we must examine
this tool in the hand of the psychotherapist from a purely psychological
viewpoint. The patient may perhaps sometimes profit from suggestion the
more, the less he understands about its nature, but the physician will
always secure the better results, the more clearly he apprehends the
working of this subtle tool. Of course, that does not mean that any
psychology is able to explain the