pled nervous system, a
believer with psychasthenic symptoms. From the point of view of the
church, there cannot be too much religion; from a therapeutic point of
view, religion works there like any other nervous remedy of which five
grains may help and fifty grains may be ruinous.

Moreover this power of inhibiting the little troubles of the body and of
bringing to work and effectiveness the deepest powers of the mind
belongs not less to any other important idea and overpowering purpose.
The soldier in battle does not feel the pain of his wound, and in an
emergency everybody develops powers of which he was not aware. The same
effect which religion produces may thus be secured by any other deep
interest: service for a great human cause, enthusiasm for a gigantic
plan, even the prospect of a great personal success. Thus in a
psychotherapeutic system, religion has only to take its place in line
with many other efforts to inhibit the feeling of misery and to
reenforce will and self-control by submission under a greater will. That
in the case of religion this submission, from an entirely different
purposive point of view, also has a moral and religious value, has in
itself no relation to the question of its therapeutic character. It
ought not to lead to any one-sided preference, inasmuch as religiously
indifferent agencies may be in the particular case a more reliable means
of improvement. Moreover the psychological symptoms are, after all, only
a fraction of the disease and very different bodily factors, digestion
and nutrition, heart and lungs and sexual organs may be most intimately
connected with the disturbance of the equilibrium. Medicine today no
longer believes that hysteria originates in the diseases of the uterus
or that neurasthenia necessarily results from insufficiencies of the
stomach, but it would be a graver mistake to believe that mental factors
alone decide the progress of the disease, however prominent the mental
symptoms may be in it.

From the physician's encouragement and the minister's influence towards
new faith in life, a short way leads to the influence of suggestion. It
is on the whole the way which leads from the general psychotherapeutic
treatment to the specific one directed against particular symptoms.

IX

THE SPECIAL METHODS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

Of course there is no abrupt division between special and general
methods. Yet the different tendency is easily recognized, if we turn
onl