ity. The more we recognize the
myriad symptoms in the hysteric patient as products of the emotional
instability, of autosuggestibility and of inhibition, the more we
understand the almost miraculous result of psychotherapeutic treatment.
Autosuggestions can be fought by countersuggestions, anaesthesia and
paraesthesia can be removed often in an instant, dissociated
personalities may be built up again through hypnotism, the most severe
bodily symptoms may disappear by influences in a waking state. Hysteria
alone would justify the demand that every physician in his student days
pass with open eyes through the field of psychology. Quite near stand
chorea and the epidemic impulses to imitative movements. And we might
bring into this neighborhood also the disturbance in the equilibrium of
the speech movements through all degrees of stammering and severe
impairment. Up to a certain degree, though not often completely, they
too yield easily to psychotherapeutic influence.

We enter now that region of constitutional disturbances in which
psychotherapy is of small help. It leads from epilepsy to the periodic
diseases, especially the maniacal depressive insanity, the paranoia
which develops late, and finally to states of idiocy which cover the
whole life. We are far from claiming that psychical influences are
entirely powerless, the more as we insisted that psychotherapy goes much
beyond mere suggestions and appeals. No psychiatrist will work without
psychological tools when he deals with the exultations of the maniac and
the depressions of the melancholic, with the hallucinations of
persecution or the erotic insanities of the paranoiac. Still more the
whole register of psychology has to be used, when we are to educate the
idiot and the imbecile. But the disappearance of the disease or of the
chief symptoms through the mental agencies is in all these cases out of
the question. Only in incipient cases, especially of melancholia and
mania, the psychotherapeutic work seems not entirely hopeless; and for
epilepsy some distinct successes cannot be denied.

We have reviewed the whole field of psychophysical disturbances, those
produced through external conditions in the normal brain and those
resulting from abnormal brain constitution. We have seen that the work
of the psychotherapist is of very unequal value in different parts of
the field; in some, as in neurasthenia, in psychasthenia, in hysteria
and similar regions most effective,