ase has its organic basis
too, and that it is entirely secondary whether we are able to find
visible traces of the organic disturbance. We had to acknowledge, to be
sure, the difference between reparable and irreparable disturbances, but
such grouping expresses only in another form the fact that experience
alone can show whether the methods of treatment which we know so far
will be successful or not. Not a few disturbances of the equilibrium
which appeared irreparable to an earlier time yield to the treatment of
to-day, and no one can determine whether much which appears irreparable
today may not be accessible either to psychotherapeutic or to physical
therapeutic means to-morrow. If we were carelessly to identify the
reparable troubles with those which we cannot recognize visibly, we
should be at a loss to understand why, for instance, many forms of
insanity are entirely beyond our psychotherapeutic influences. On the
other hand, every physician who uses psychotherapeutic means is
surprised to see the effective bodily readjustment where serious
disturbances perhaps of the circulatory system or the digestive system
existed. What the methods can do and what they cannot do must simply be
left to experience, but of course to an experience which is eager to
expand itself by ever new experimental curative efforts.

From this point of view we can see clearly the general division of the
whole field of possible psychotherapy. Psychotherapy influences
psychophysical states in the interest of health. There are only two
possibilities open: either the disturbance is in the psychophysical
system itself or it is outside of it, that is in the other parts of the
body which are somehow under the influence of the mind. In the first
case when the disturbance occurs in the mind-brain system itself, we
ought to separate two large groups, first those cases in which the
system itself is normal and the disturbance comes from without, and
second those in which the constitution of the system itself was abnormal
and led to disturbances under conditions in which a normal system would
not have suffered. We have to consider both groups somewhat more in
detail, as each again allows a large variety of cases.

Thus we have before us, first the normal mind-brain system into which a
disturbance breaks, injuring more or less severely and for a longer or
shorter time the equilibrium of the psychophysical functions. Here
belong any bodily processes which p