cal one, we see at once that this common procedure of both
schools is unjustified and dangerous. Mental therapy and physical
therapy ought to be most intimately connected parts of the same
therapeutic effort and mental therapy includes by far more than mere
suggestions and appeals. All that involves of course that its systematic
application belongs in the hands of the well-trained physician and of
nobody else, but on the other hand, it involves that every physician
ought to be well schooled in psychology.

As soon as a disturbance to be cured is considered as a lack of
equilibrium in psychophysical functions, every mental influence, every
suggestion and appeal becomes itself an excitement or an inhibition of
nerve cells. The sharp demarcation line between a psychical agency and a
physical one disappears altogether; the spoken word is then considered
as physical airwaves which stimulate certain brain centers and in the
given paths this stimulation is carried to hundreds of thousands of
neurons. The protracted warm bath or the cold douche influences, too,
large brain parts by changing the blood circulation which controls the
activity of those neurons; or the bromides absorbed in the digestive
apparatus, or the morphine injected, also reach the neurons and again
have a different kind of influence on them, and the electric current may
stimulate the nervous system in still a different way. It may be, and
under many conditions certainly is, essential to influence the brain
cells just in that particular way which results from the spoken word,
but there too the causal influence remains a function of the physical
effect and thus by principle there is no sharp separation from other
physical means. Thus to believe in psychotherapy ought never to mean
that we have a right to make light of the other means which, as
experience shows, may help towards the treatment of disturbances in the
central equilibrium. Suggestions and bromides together may secure an
effect which neither of them alone will bring about. It is most
unfortunate that not without some guilt on the part of the physicians
themselves, the large public has begun to believe that orthodox
psychotherapy has to mean a rejection of drugs and a contempt for the
doctors who prescribe them.

Of course a discussion of psychotherapy cannot enter into the study of
these physical agencies of treatment, but at the threshold, we have to
insist that there exists no opposition between p