Psychotherapy by Hugo Münsterberg (world of reading .TXT) 📕

to its elements, will make most careful use of those accessory influences. The minister, who necessarily has his spiritual aim in mind, cannot even become aware of all the involuntary influences which reach the mind in its most suggestible state. There can be no doubt that it would often need psychological art to avoid the creation of new pathological symptoms in such half-hypnotized patients. Yet the minister even goes so far as to make use of the sleeping mind without any consideration of the possible damage which may be done to his subject. He goes to the bedside of a sleeping girl and whispers his suggestions and is satisfied when they show their effects the next day. It does not lie in his horizon to consider the grave consequences which such suggestions during sleep may produce during future years in the brain the sleep of which has been transformed into such half-somnambulic relations. Hysterias may be created by such methods. No one can blame the minister for his remoteness from such doubts and problems, but the physician is to be blamed if he encourages the belief that all this still belongs to the proper sphere of the ministerial worker in abnormal psychology.

Those engaged in such work were not long in finding out that the mere emotional inspiration is often no sufficient remedy, and the development went along the same lines in which it has gone everywhere for some thousands of years. Not to disappoint the sufferers, the religion had to become in very many cases simply an inactive side issue and the real cure was performed by the same methods with which any worldly neuropathologist would go to work. If the woman who cannot sleep is cured from her insomnia by being made to listen to the beats of a metronome, it may sometimes be effective, however crude, but it is certainly no longer religion, even though the metronome stands in a minister's room. The more the movement spreads to those who have no psychological training and knowledge, the more it must be necessary for them to import the whole claptrap of the quack hypnotist and soon the minister may discover that in certain cases physical means and drugs help still better. Thus he simply enters into competition with the regular physician, only with the difference that he has never studied medicine. The chances are great that in his hands even such remedies and drugs may do harm and finally, even if they were effective, is not the question justified: will not religion suffer?

Indeed we have so far considered the question from one side only. We have confined ourselves to the question of how far such a movement is sound for the interests of the patient; but can we be blind to the other side and overlook the not less important problem of whether it lies in the interests of religion and of the church to amalgamate its spiritual work with a medical one? We are not thinking of those widespread, unfair arguments to the effect that this whole movement is undignified because it is instituted by the desire to fill the empty pews or to make competition with the success of Christian Science. That is utterly unjust. But there are intrinsic factors in the movement which interfere with the true aims of religion. First of all it cheapens religion by putting the accent in the meaning of life on personal comfort and absence of pain. The originators of the Emmanuel Movement stand well above such error, but their national congregations do not. Certainly the longing for pleasure and a well feeling and the abhorrence of pain and illness pervades our practical life and keeps in motion all our utilitarian efforts. But if there is one power in our life which ought to develop in us a conviction that pleasure is not the highest goal and that pain is not the worst evil, then it ought to be philosophy and religion. It is only the surface appearance if it seems as if the religious therapeutics minimizes the importance of pain; in truth it does the opposite. It tries to abolish pain, but not because it thinks little of pain; on the contrary, because it thinks so much of pain that it is willing even to put the whole of religion into the service of this strife for bodily comfort. The longing for freedom from pain becomes the one aim for which we are to be religious. In a time which denies all absolute ideals, which seeks the meaning of truth only in a pragmatic usefulness, it may be quite consistent to seek the meaning of religion in its service for removal of pain, and personal enjoyment. But in that case the ideal of both religion and truth is lost. It is finally not less undignified for religion to seek support for the religious belief in effects which it shares and knows that it shares with any superstitious belief on earth. Granted that the church can cure: the shaman of Siberia can cure too, and the amulets of Thibet not less. The psychologizing church knows, therefore, that it is not the value of the religion which restores the unbalanced nervous system; and yet it wants to provide for the spreading of true belief by the miraculous cures which it exhibits.

This situation naturally produces the desire of the church to substitute a religious explanation for a psychological one. It is claimed that after all it is not the mental effect of the prayer, but the prayer itself, not the psychophysical emotion of religion, but the value of religion which determines the cure. Yet in that moment the whole movement in its modern shape comes into a still more precarious position. If the cure results from the inner value of the religion how can we confine it to the so-called functional diseases and abstain from any hope in organic diseases? Luther, from his religious point of view, still had the right to separate the two groups because only those functional diseases were effects of the devil, obsessions which could be banished by the minister and by prayer, while the other diseases did not result from the devil, but merely from natural causes. Such a definition does not fit into the modern system. To-day from a really religious point of view, both groups of diseases must be acknowledged to be natural or with Mrs. Eddy, as the work of the unholy spirit. Christian Science is indeed by far more consistent. If the cure results through the meaning and value of religion, there is no reason whatever why cancer and diphtheria and paralysis should not be cured as well as psychasthenia. And if, on the other hand, organic diseases cannot be cured because the psychophysical process of the religious emotion has no influence over diphtheria bacilli, then the whole process is removed to the causal sphere and it is acknowledged that the purposive meaning of religion is not in question at all. The whole system of such religious psychotherapeutics is therefore in its inner structure contradictory. It contains causal and purposive elements without any possibility of unifying them. They are loosely mixed, and the power of prayer means on one page something entirely different from what it means on another. In these respects Christian Science is by far more unified and in harmony with itself; its therapeutics is really anchored in a system.

From a scientific point of view, its dangerousness is of course much greater inasmuch as it extends its methods over every organic disease and thus applies merely psychical treatment where from a standpoint of scientific medicine, physical treatment would be absolutely necessary. Moreover its philosophy is after all only a pseudophilosophy; its tempting equations of disease and error and sin and unreality are ultimately a mere playing with conceptions. If we were to point to the root of the misunderstanding in Christian Science, we should say that everything depends on the philosophical commonplace that the objects with which we deal in our life are ideas and that our whole experience is mind. "Christian Science reveals incontrovertibly that Mind is All-in-All, that the only realities are the divine mind and idea." But now silently this mental character of the real world is identified with the mental experience which stands in contrast to the physical experience. There results the impression that physical experience therefore, does not belong to the world of reality. It is evident, however, that mental in contrast to physical means something entirely different from mental in the philosophical sense. In the latter meaning of the word, we all agree that the world is mental; the word mental indicates there that the world has reality not in itself but only as experience of subjects. In the second sense, mental or psychical means that it is experience for one particular subject only and not for every possible subject. The physical thing, for instance this table, is indeed different from my mental memory idea of a table, inasmuch as every possible subject can experience this table while my mental memory image belongs to me alone. The physical table and the mental memory image of it are both equally mental in the philosophical sense, inasmuch as the physical which is object for every possible subject and in this sense not mental is therefore not less given to subjects. Every physical body with its disease is thus in one sense taken as something not mental while in another sense as mental; if we use the same word in two entirely different meanings, it indeed cannot be difficult to demonstrate any metaphysical consequences.

But we do not have to deal here with the metaphysics of "Science and Health." If it is brought down to the concrete application, we stand before the same confusion which characterizes all compromises. Causal effects are sought in a sphere which belongs to purposive values. The psychological effects of the emotion of faith are sought and are misinterpreted as the emanations of religious powers. Religious psychotherapeutics in all its forms seeks to demonstrate to us the triumph of the soul over the body, while in reality it deals only with the mental mechanism which as such belongs to the chain of causal events in the same natural way as the organism. The soul, as spiritual agency in its sphere of purposes and ideals, does not enter the machinery of psychotherapy, and the psychological material on which psychotherapy is applied is not freer and not better and does not stand higher than the material of the bodily cells and tissues. The Emmanuel Movement deserves the highest credit for bringing about a systematic contact between religious faith cure and scientific medicine, but the time in which the minister himself undertook the medical treatment had to be a time of transition. It had to lead to a new relation in which the ministerial function is confined to the spiritual task of upbuilding a mind while the therapeutic function remains entirely in the hands of the physician. Where the physician believes that the psychomedical treatment demands a new equilibrium of the patient to be secured by religion, there the minister should be called for assistance. Psychotherapeutic hospitals would offer the most favorable conditions for such coöperation. But the minister ought to enter even such a hospital with a strictly spiritual aim, and he should never forget that the task of the church stands much higher than the utilitarian task of removing pain from the sick room. But if those psychotherapeutic hospitals will flourish and the physicians will at last make use of psychical factors in their regular practice, they ought not to forget on their part that the important step forward was taken under the pressure of popular religious movements. The ministers first saw what the physicians ought to have seen