the way in which the various symptoms which
suggest mental treatment occur, and how they yield to the psychical
methods. We had also agreed beforehand that for a first survey we might
separate the mental from the bodily symptoms and group the mental ones
with reference to the predominance of ideational, emotional, and
volitional factors. And finally it may be said that we abstain from
everything which is exceptional or even unusual, and confine ourselves
to the routine observations with which the psychotherapist comes in
contact every day and the simplest country physician surely every week.

Thus I turn from systematic objectivity to my unsystematic reminiscences
of many years. Of course, they abound with eccentric abnormities and
startling phenomena. As I have devoted myself to psychotherapeutics,
always and only from scientific interest, as a part of my laboratory
studies and therefore have refused to spend any time on cases which
offered no special psychological interest to me, the striking and
sensational cases have prevailed in my practice even to an unusual
degree. Yet they are unessential for our purposes here, the more as
their interest lies mostly in the complex structure of the mental state
while the curative features are in the background. Our purpose of
demonstrating practical cases as they occur in every village, and as
they ought to be understood and treated by every doctor, thus rules out
just those experiences which would be prominent in a theoretical study
of abnormal psychology. We want to select only simple commonplace cases.
Only those who have not learned to see are unaware that such cases are
everywhere about them.

As a matter of course, I also leave out everything which refers to
insanity, that is, every mental disturbance which lies essentially
outside of the domain of psychotherapy. The helpful influence which
psychical factors can exert in the asylums for the insane is, as we
emphasized, entirely secondary. The psychotherapeutic methods in the
narrower sense of the word are in the present state of our knowledge
ineffective in the insane asylum. I should also be unable to speak of
laboratory experience with insanity, as I insist on sanitarium treatment
in every such case. The question of how to differentiate the diagnosis
of insanity from that of the other mental abnormities is not our
question at this moment. I select the few illustrations which seem to me
desirable for the purpose of makin