Methods of Psychotherapy Part III

Seen from a causal point of view, however, there is no miracle in it at all. On the contrary, it is a natural psychophysical process which demands careful supervision not to become dangerous.
It is not the value of the religion which determines the improvement, and it is not God who makes the cure; or to speak less irreligiously, the physician ought to say that if it is God who cures through the prayer, it is not less God who cures in other cases through bromide and morphine, and on the other side just as God often refuses to cure through the prescribed drugs of the drug store, God not less often refuses to cure through prayer and church influence. But the real standpoint of the physician will be to consider both the drugs and the religious ideas merely as causal agencies and to try to understand the conditions of their efficiency and the limits which are set for them.

From such a point of view, he will certainly acknowledge that submission to a greater power is a splendid effect of inhibition and at the same time a powerful effect for the stimulation of unused energies; but he will recognize also that the use of those silent energies is not without dangers. Certainly nature has supplied us with a reservoir of normally unused psychophysical strength, to which we may resort just as the tissues of our body may nourish us for a few days when we are deprived of food, but such supply, which in exceptional cases may become the last refuge, cannot be used without a serious intrusion and interference with the normal household of mind and body. To extract these lowest layers of energies may mean for the psychophysical system a most exhausting effort which may soon bring a reaction of physical and nervous weakness. The chances are great that such a religious excitement, if it is really to have a deep effect, may go over into a mystic fascination which leads to hysteria or into an exhausting eruption of energies which ends in neurasthenic after-effects.

The immediate successes of the strong religious influence on the weakened nervous system, especially on the nervous system of a weak inherited constitution, are too often stage effects which do not last. From a mere purposive point of view, they may be complete successes. They may have turned the immoral man into a moral man, the skeptic into a believer, but the physician cannot overlook that the result may be a moral man with a crippled nervous system, a believer with psychasthenic symptoms.

From the point of view of the church, there cannot be too much religion; from a therapeutic point of view, religion works there like any other nervous remedy of which five grains may help and fifty grains may be ruinous. Moreover this power of inhibiting the little troubles of the body and of bringing to work and effectiveness the deepest powers of the mind belongs not less to any other important idea and overpowering purpose. The soldier in battle does not feel the pain of his wound, and in an emergency everybody develops powers of which he was not aware. The same effect which religion produces may thus be secured by any other deep interest: service for a great human cause, enthusiasm for a gigantic plan, even the prospect of a great personal success.

Thus in a psychotherapeutic system, religion has only to take its place in line with many other efforts to inhibit the feeling of misery and to reinforce will and self-control by submission under a greater will. That in the case of religion this submission, from an entirely different purposive point of view, also has a moral and religious value, has in itself no relation to the question of its therapeutic character. It ought not to lead to any one-sided preference, inasmuch as religiously indifferent agencies may be in the particular case a more reliable means of improvement.

Moreover the psychological symptoms are, after all, only a fraction of the disease and very different bodily factors, digestion and nutrition, heart and lungs and sexual organs may be most intimately connected with the disturbance of the equilibrium. Medicine today no longer believes that hysteria originates in the diseases of the uterus or that neurasthenia necessarily results from insufficiencies of the stomach, but it would be a graver mistake to believe that mental factors alone decide the progress of the disease, however prominent the mental symptoms may be in it. From the physician’s encouragement and the minister’s influence towards new faith in life, a short way leads to the influence of suggestion. It is on the whole the way which leads from the general psychotherapeutic treatment to the specific one directed against particular symptoms.

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