Psychotherapy

The most recent articles

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  Hugo Münsterberg

  Psychotherapy and The Community

  Psychotherapy (PartIII: The Place of Psychotherapy)

  ‘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 view of life which makes man’s inner experience simply an effect of foregoing causes. All life becomes a psychophysical mechanism and from that point of view man’s thinking and acting become the necessary outcome of the foregoing conditions. Nothing seems more unfit to give a deeper meaning to life and a higher value. And yet if there was one thought which controlled our discussion from the beginning, it was certainly the conviction that this causal view itself is only an instrument in the service of idealistic endeavors; the reality of man’s life is the reality of will and freedom directed towards ideals. One of these ideals is the reconstruction of the world in the thought forms of causality. In the service of our ideals we may thus transform the world into a mechanism: out of our freedom we desire to conceive ourselves as necessary products. Whenever we aim to produce changes in the world, we must calculate the effects through the means of this causal construction, but we never have a right to forget that this calculation itself is therefore only a tool and that our reality, in which our duties and our real aims lie, is itself outside of this construction. The psychotherapist wants to produce effects inasmuch as he wants to cure disease. He is therefore obliged to adjust his work as such entirely to the causal aspect of man, as soon as he wants to seek the means by which he can reach the end. But even the fact that he decides in favor of those ends, that he aims towards their realization, binds him to a world of purposes, and therefore, he, too, with his whole psychophysical work, stands with both feet in a reality of will which is controlled not by causes but by purposes, not by natural laws but by ideals.’ (Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotherapy).

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  Hugo Münsterberg

  Psychotherapy and The Physician

  Psychotherapy (PartIII: The Place of Psychotherapy)

  ‘The latest movement, which is entirely in its beginning, the development of which no one can foresee, but which promises wide perspectives, is connected with the name of Freud in Vienna. The entirely new turn of psychotherapy is given by the fact that his aim is not to overcome a symptom by suggestion but to make it disappear by removing the ultimate mental cause. He found that large groups of mental disturbances result from a psychical trauma, a disagreeable idea which, inhibited in the mind, becomes the source of mischief and produces phobias and obsessions and hysterical motions. The cure of the symptoms demands the recognition of this first mental accident, which may lie back for years and which may no longer be in the memory of the patient. As soon as this earlier experience is brought to consciousness again, it needs only a natural discharge and a normal expression and the symptoms which it brought about will disappear. Thus the cure itself needs no hypnotism and no persuasion or suggestion but the reawakening of forgotten situations, and only in the service of this effort hypnotism may be used to reënforce the memory. Yet this represents only the first period of Freud’s activity, in which he collaborated with Breuer, a phase which is represented by their book on hysteria, in 1895. But there followed a further development which is still more essential. The hysterical disturbance may indeed have started with such an accidental traumatic impression but that does not explain why just this impression had such a strong effect. Other impressions of equal strength and emotional vividness may have passed without leaving any damaging result. And therefore there must be some prior cause in the subject which makes just this particular impression so injurious; and here is the point of Freud’s fundamental discovery, which for the layman appears on the surface to have little probability but which has proved of greatest consequence for clinical work. It was found that only those situations become injurious and become starting points for hysterical symptoms which touch on repressed and artificially inhibited ideas of the sexual sphere.’ (Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotherapy).

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  Hugo Münsterberg

  Psychotherapy and The Church

  Psychotherapy (PartIII: The Place of Psychotherapy)

  ‘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 before, but the physicians will see it more fully and more correctly.’ (Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotherapy).

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  Hugo Münsterberg

  The Bodily Symptoms

  Psychotherapy (PartII: The Pratical Work of Psychotherapy)

  ‘The unprejudiced psychotherapist will be perfectly able to find room for such cures and, if it is the duty of the scientific physician to make use of every natural energy in the interest of the patient’s health, he has no right to neglect the overwhelming powers of the apparently mysterious states. Some of this power ought to irradiate from his eye and his voice whenever he crosses the threshold of a sick-room. Some of that power ought to emanate from him with every pill and drug which he prescribes. The psychotherapeutic energies which work for real health outside of the medical profession form a stream of vast power, but without solid bed and without dam. That stream when it overfloods will devastate its borders and destroy its bridges. The physicians are the engineers whose duty it is to direct that stream into safe channels, to distribute it so that it may work under control wherever it is needed, and to take care that its powerful energy is not lost for suffering mankind.’ (Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotherapy).

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  Hugo Münsterberg

  The Mental Symptoms

  Psychotherapy (PartII: The Pratical Work of Psychotherapy)

  ‘The training of inhibition stood in the foreground and every haphazard reaction was severely rebuked. The summer vacations spent with the parents in the fashionable surroundings, to be sure, had always a retarding influence, but the main part of the year in which it was possible to carry through the strict discipline showed such steady and inspiring progress that the boy, while of course feeble-minded for life, can yet live externally a harmonious life.
  A systematic training of the power of inhibition is indeed the fundamental factor in all psychotherapeutic treatment when the disturbance is in the volitional sphere, but the inhibition is secured most safely by reënforcement of the antagonistic attitude. From these volitional variations on the one side, from the ideational disturbances on the other, only a few steps lead to those dissociations of the personality which are characteristic of many graver cases of hysteria. But to give to them any adequate analysis, it would be insufficient to refer in this brief way to particular cases. Psychopathological literature possesses some excellent analyses of such complex disturbances. As I said before, I abstain entirely here from such complex phenomena, as they enter too seldom into the sphere of the practitioner and as the bewildering manifoldness of their symptoms does not allow us so easily to recognize the fundamental principles which alone were to be illustrated by our short survey of practical cases.’ (Hugo Münsterberg, Psychotherapy).

This section's articles

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  Hugo Münsterberg

  The Special Methods of Psychotherapy

  Psychotherapy (PartII: The Pratical Work of Psychotherapy)

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  Hugo Münsterberg

  The General Methods of Psychotherapy

  Psychotherapy (PartII: The Pratical Work of Psychotherapy)

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  Hugo Münsterberg

  The Field of Psychotherapy

  Psychotherapy (PartII: The Pratical Work of Psychotherapy)

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  Hugo Münsterberg

  The Subconscious

  Psychotherapy (PartI: The Psychological Basis of Psychotherapy)

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  Hugo Münsterberg

  Suggestion and Hypnotism

  Psychotherapy (PartI: The Psychological Basis of Psychotherapy)

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  Hugo Münsterberg

  Psychology and Medicine

  Psychotherapy (PartI: The Psychological Basis of Psychotherapy)

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  Hugo Münsterberg

  Mind and Brain

  Psychotherapy (PartI: The Psychological Basis of Psychotherapy)

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  Hugo Münsterberg

  The Aim of Psychology

  Psychotherapy (PartI: The Psychological Basis of Psychotherapy)

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  Hugo Münsterberg

  Psychotherapy

  Preface and Introduction