to the
domain of psychotherapy.

But what we have discussed now leaves little doubt as to the necessary
decision. The physician is interested in the mental life with the aim of
producing a certain effect, namely, that of health. Thus the mental life
of the whole personality comes in question for him as belonging to a
chain of causes and effects; whichever levers he may move, everything is
to be a cause which, in accordance with causal laws, is to produce a
certain change. Inner life is thus, in the interests of medical
treatment, necessarily a part of a causal system. This means the
standpoint of scientific psychology is the only adequate one. The
purposive view of inner life ought not to be in question when the
patient enters the doctor's office.

To characterize the difference, it may be said at once that it is a
purposive view which belongs to the minister. If the minister says to
his despairing parishioner, "Be courageous, my friend, and be faithful,"
nothing but a strictly purposive view gives meaning to the situation.
The word friend indicates it, that one subject of will approaches
another subject of will, with the intention of sympathy and
understanding of the attitude of the other; and the advice to be
courageous and faithful means an appeal which has its whole meaning in
the relation to aims and ends. The speaker and the hearer are both
moving in a sphere of will relations, purposes and ideals, sin and
virtue, hope and belief. To take the other extreme: if the neurasthenic
in his state of depression and in his feeling of inability seeks relief
from the nerve specialist, he too may say: "My friend, be courageous and
faithful," yet his words have an entirely different purpose. They are
not appeals to a common interest of belief; they are subtle tools with
which to touch and to change certain psychophysical processes, certain
states in mind and brain; there each word is a sound which awakens
certain mental associations, and these associations are expected to be
causes of certain effects and these effects are to inhibit those
disturbing states of emotional depression. If a few grains of sodium
bromide were to produce the same effect, they would be just as welcome.
The whole consideration moves in a sphere in which only physiological
and psychological processes are happening. Thus the physician may work
with the ideas of religious belief, but those ideas are then no longer
religious values but natural psychophysi