sychophysiological and
physiological means of influencing the brain. It may be true that drugs
and baths and electricity have no influence on the subconscious, but the
trouble is not that the drugs are inefficient but that they cannot
influence what does not exist. In the same way disappears now that new
boundary line for psychotherapy which wants to limit it to mere
suggestion and appeal. If psychotherapy employs all the means by which
we can influence mental states in the interest of the health of the
personality, we have no reason to confine it either to a persuasion of
the subconscious through suggestion and hypnotism or a persuasion of the
conscious, in which it works as a moral appeal. Suggestion and hypnotism
certainly must play a large part in psychotherapy and that part does not
become smaller by the fact that we reject the subconscious
interpretation of them and consider them entirely as psychophysical
processes. And in the same way undoubtedly we have to acknowledge the
psychophysiological effect of persuasion and of the appeals to the
conscious intellect and will. But for us as psychotherapists all those
factors have no moral value but only a therapeutic one, and thus stand
in line with any other influence that may help, even though from a
purposive point of view it stands on a much lower level. A mere mental
distraction by enjoyment and play and sport, an aesthetic influence
through art, a mere stimulus to automatic imitation, an enforced mental
rest, an involuntary discharge of suppressed ideas, and many similar
schemes and even tricks of the mental physician belong with the same
right to psychotherapy.

It is really doubtful whether the moral and religious appeals are always
helpful and not sometimes or often even dangerous for the health of the
individual; and it is not doubtful that morally and religiously
indifferent mental influences are often of the highest curative value.
The more we abstract from everything which suggests either the mysticism
of the subconscious or the moral issues of a mind which is independent
of the body, the more we shall be able to answer the question as to the
means by which health can be restored. This question is neither a moral
nor a philosophical one but strictly one of experience. In this
connection, we must remember that we also have had to give up the
artificial demarcation line between organic and functional diseases. We
recognized that every so-called functional dise