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

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 psychophysical material, which is to be applied whenever it appears as the right means to secure a certain effect.

On the other hand the minister also knows, of course, that every word which he speaks has its psychological effect, but he abstracts from that entirely, as his belief should appeal directly to the struggling will of the man. As minister, he is thus not a psychologist. He works with moral means; the physician, with causal means. The view which the doctor has to take of the man before him is therefore thoroughly psychological; whereas that of the religious friend is thoroughly unpsychological, or better, apsychological. Indeed it is misleading, or at least demands a special kind of definition, if people say that the minister has to be a good psychologist. It is just as misleading as the claim, which we hear so often, that for instance Shakespeare was a great psychologist. No, the poet deals with human beings from the purposive standpoint of life and the mere resolving of complex purposes into parts of purposes is not psychology in the technical sense of the term. The poet makes us understand the inner life, but he does not describe or explain it; he makes us feel with other people, but he does not make those feelings causally understood. The realistic novelists sometimes undertake this psychological task, but they are then on the borderland of literature, the analysis of their heroes becomes then a psychological one. Shakespeare understood human beings better than anyone and therefore the men and women whom his imagination created are so fully lifelike that the psychologist may feel justified in using them as material for his psychological analysis, but Shakespeare himself did not enter into that psychological dissection; he kept the purposive point of view. In the same way certainly the minister—the same holds true for the lawyer or the tradesman or anyone who enters into practical dealings with his neighbor—may resolve complex attitudes of will into their components, but each part still remains a will attitude which has to be understood and to be interpreted and to be appreciated, while the psychologist would take every one of those parts as a conscious content to be described and to be explained. But here we abstract from the purposive relations. Our attention belongs now to the doctor's dealing with man; for him cause and effect are the only vehicles of connection. Thus he has to exclude the purposive interpretation of inner life and has to understand every factor involved from a psychological point of view: his psychotherapy must be thoroughly applied psychology.

The day of applied psychology is only dawning. The situation is indeed surprising. The last three or four decades have given to the world at last a really scientific study of psychology, a study not unworthy of being compared with that of physics or chemistry or biology. In the center of the whole movement stood the psychological laboratory with its equipment for the most subtle analysis and explanatory investigation of mental phenomena. The first psychological laboratory was created in Leipzig, Germany, in 1878. It became the parent institution for laboratories in all countries. At present, America alone has more than fifty psychological laboratories, many of them large institutions equipped with precious instruments for the study of ideas and emotions, memories and feelings, sensations and actions. Still more rapid than this external growth of the laboratory psychology was the inner growth of the experimental method. It began with simple experiments on sensations and impulses, and it seemed as if it would remain impossible to attack with the experimental scheme the higher and more complex psychical structures. But just as in physics and chemistry the triumphal march of the experimental method could not be stopped, one part of the psychological field after another was conquered. Attention and memory, association and inhibition, emotion and volition, judgment and feeling all became subjected to the scientific scheme of experiment. And that was all supplemented by the progress of physiological psychology, pathological psychology, child psychology, animal psychology. In this way the last decades created a science which of course was by principle a continuation of the old psychology, but yet which had good reason to designate itself as a "new" psychology.

But in this whole development, until yesterday, the curious fact remained that it was going on without any narrow contact with practical life; it was a science for the scientist and measured by its practical achievements in daily life, it seemed barren and unproductive. Psychology was studied as palæontology and Sanscrit were studied, without any direct relation to the life which surrounds us. And yet after all it deals with the mental facts which have to enter into every one of our practical deeds, if we are to consider mental life from a psychological point of view. The psychologists were certainly not to be blamed for sticking to their theoretical interests. More than that, they were certainly justified in their reluctance, as everything was in the making, and incomplete theories can easily do more harm than good. But slowly a certain consolidation has set in; large sets of facts have been secured, and psychology seems better prepared to become serviceable to the practical tasks. On the other hand, it has been noticeable for some time that not a few of the psychological results have gone over into unprofessional hands and have been thrown on the market places and have been brought into many a home where no one knew how to deal with them rightly. Thus the need seems urgent that the psychologists give up their over-reserved attitude and recognize it as their duty to serve the needs of the community.

It is not sufficient for that end, simply to take odds and ends of psychology and to hand them over to anyone who can see some use for them. We must have a systematic scientific work done for the special purpose of adjusting psychological knowledge to the definite practical tasks and of examining the psychological facts with that practical end in view. A science must be developed which is related to psychology as engineering is related to physics and chemistry. Just as the technological laboratories of the engineer bring out many new problems which the physicist would never have approached, in the same way we may expect that special institutions for applied psychology will shape the psychological inquiry in a new way.

Such a new science of applied psychology of course has before it a field just as large and manifold as the field of technology, where physical engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, and electrical engineering and so on are separated. Such a future psychological technology would deal, for instance, with psychopedagogical problems. There belongs everything which refers to the psychology of memory or attention, of discipline, of fatigue, of habit, of imitation or effort; in short, all those mental factors which have to be considered whenever the schoolchild is looked on from a causal point of view. Further there is the psycholegal field where the memory and the perceptions, the suggestibility and the emotions of the witness are to be studied, where the psychological conditions which lead to crime, the means to tap the hidden thoughts of the criminal, the inhibitions for the prevention of crime, the mental effects of punishment and similar causal processes must be determined. There are the psychoscientific problems referring to psychological influences on the observations and judgments and discriminations of the scholar who watches the stars or who translates an inscription. There are the psychoæsthetic problems where the task is to examine causally the factors which lead to the agreeable effects of beautiful surroundings, and from the height of the psychology of æsthetics in painting and sculpture, the inquiry may go to the psychology of the pleasant effects in dress-making or cooking. There are the large groups of psychotechnical problems where the effort refers to the application of psychology in securing the best conditions for labor and industry and commerce. It leads from the mental effects of signals or the mental fatigue in mills to the secrets of advertisements and salesmanship. There are especially important psychodiagnostical studies where the aim is to determine the individual differences of man by experimental methods and to make use of them for the selection of the right man for the right place. There are psychosocial problems where we examine the psychological factors which have to enter into public movements, into social reforms, into legislation and into politics. In this way new and ever new groups may be added; every time the central thought is: how far can causal psychological knowledge help us to reach a certain end? Together with these forms of applied psychology, we find the psychomedical problems; here belongs everything which allows the application of causal psychology in the interests of health.

It might be answered that this demand for a strictly causal point of view can hardly be fulfilled, because, if I am acting,—it may be in the interest of education or law or technique or medicine,—I must always have an end in view and to select such an end belongs after all to my system of purposes. If I am a teacher and have to deal with children, then it may be said that after all, my knowledge of causal psychology cannot help me if I am uncertain for which ideals I want to educate these children. Psychology can tell me that I need these means, if I want to reach certain effects, but I cannot find out by psychology which effects are