blic opinion, through example and
tradition, and even through fashion and prejudices, are millionfold,
but not less numerous are the channels for antisocial and antihygienic
suggestions. No one can measure the injury done to the psychophysical
balance of the weaker brains, for instance, by the sensational court
gossip and reports of murder trials in the newspapers for the masses.
But while the influence of suggestion is on the whole familiar to public
opinion, the community is much less aware of another factor which we
found important in the hands of the psychotherapist. We recognized that
mental disturbances were often the result of suppressed emotion and
repressed wishes. For the cure the psychotherapist has to aim toward the
cathartic result. The suppressed ideas had to be brought to
consciousness again and then to be discharged through vivid expression.
Society ought to learn from it that few factors are more disturbing for
the mental balance than feelings and emotions which do not come to a
normal expression. It is no chance that in countries of mixed Protestant
and Catholic civilization, the number of suicides is larger in
Protestant regions than in the Catholic ones where the confessional
relieves the suppressed emotions of the masses. This is also the most
destructive effect of social and legal injustice; emotions are
strangulated and then begin to work mischief. The community should take
care early that secret feelings are avoided, that the child is cured
from all sullenness which stores up the emotion instead of discharging
it. Certainly all education and social life demands inhibition and also
the child has to learn not to give expression to every passing feeling.
To find there the sound middle way is again the real hygienic ideal. Too
much in our social life and especially in the sphere of sexuality forces
on the individual a hypocrisy and secrecy which is among the most
powerful conditions of later mental instability.

Of course the background of a hygienic life of the community remains the
philosophy of life which gives unity to the scattered energies and
consequently steadiness to the individual through all his hazards of
fate. It might seem doubtful whether society could get the prescription
for such a steady view of the world also from the workshop of the
psychotherapist. To the superficial observer the opposite might seem
evident, as every word of our psychotherapeutic study indicated that
that is a vi