er analysis of the mental
facts involved was indeed at the very first most essential. Now we can
easily draw the conclusions from our findings.

We recognized from the start the fundamental difference between two
different attitudes which we can take towards the inner life of any
personality, the purposive view and the causal. We recognized the sphere
to which each belongs and we saw that all medical treatment demands the
causal view, thus dealing with inner life as part of the causal chain of
events. Each inner experience became therefore a series of so-called
contents of consciousness. These contents can be described and must be
analyzed into their elements. The basis of psychotherapy is therefore an
analytic psychology which conceives the inner experience as a
combination of psychical elements.

But the final aim was the causal connection. The appearance and
disappearance of those millions of elements and their connection had to
be explained. We recognized that such an explanation of the contents of
consciousness was possible only through the connections between the
accompanying brain processes. Every psychical change had to be conceived
as parallel to a physiological change. The psychology which is to be the
basis of psychotherapy had to be therefore a physiological psychology.

We recognized that these psychophysiological processes were processes of
transmission between impressions and expressions, that is, between
incoming nervous currents and outgoing nervous currents, between stimuli
and reactions. Thus we have no central process which is not influenced
by the surroundings and which is not at the same time the starting point
of an action. We have normal health of the personality as long as there
is a complete equilibrium in the functions of the organism which adjusts
the activities to the surroundings. Every abnormality is a disturbance
of this equilibrium. A psychology which is the basis of psychotherapy
thus conceives every mental process in relation to both the ideas and
the actions; it avoids all one-sidedness by which the mind is cut off
either from its resources or from its effects. The relations to the
impressions are usually the less neglected: and we must the more
emphasize the fact that the psychology needed for psychotherapy knows no
mental fact which does not start an action and that every change in the
system of actions involves a change in the central experience. Wherever
this equilibrium of adju