elders is just such an influence. If it were
really a moral demand that the will be left to its own resources and
that no outside influence come to strengthen its power or remove its
hindrances or smooth its path, then we ought to let the children grow up
as nature created them and ought not to try to suppress from without by
discipline and training, by love and encouragement, the willful
impulses and the ugly habits. Even every good model for imitation is
such a suggestive influence from without and every solemn appeal to
loyalty and friendship, to patriotism and religion, increases the degree
of suggestibility. That is the glory of life that the suggestive power
may belong to moral values instead of mere pleasures, but it is not the
aim of life to remain untouched by suggestion. And he who by suggestion
helps the weak mind to overcome obstacles which the strong mind can
overthrow from its inborn resources works for the good of the individual
and of the community in the spirit of truest morality.

Much more justified than such ethical objections are the fears which
move entirely in the causal sphere. It must be acknowledged that a
method which has such powerful influence over the mind that it can
secure ideas and emotions and impulses which the own will of the patient
cannot produce, ought to be allowed only to those who are prepared for
its skillful use. To hypnotize or to perform any persistent
psychotherapeutic treatment may thus be dangerous, if it is done by the
unfit. We have discussed before the injuries which might result from the
administration of such powerful psychotherapeutic effects through the
best meaning minister, but we can extend this fear to anyone who has not
systematically studied medicine and to a certain degree normal and
abnormal psychology. The possibilities of overlooking symptoms which
ought to suggest an entirely different treatment, or of adjusting the
treatment badly to the special physical conditions, or of ignoring the
desirable physical supplement by drugs, or of creating unintentionally
by suggestion injurious effects, are always open when medical amateurs
undertake such work. Certainly there is no physician who is not liable
to make mistakes, and a physician who has never given any attention to
psychology and psychiatry would also be a rather poor agent of
psychotherapeutic methods, but the probability is that such a physician
would simply abstain by principle from all psychotherapeut