Psychotherapy
James Walsh
James J. Walsh
Psychotherapy / Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of Disease
PREFACE
"Prefaces are a great waste of time," said Francis Bacon, "and, though they seem to proceed of modesty, they are bravery." In spite of this deterring expression of the Lord Chancellor, the author ventures to write a short apologia pro libro suo. Five years ago he began at Fordham University School of Medicine a series of lectures on Psychotherapy. This book consists of material gathered for these lectures. It will be found in many ways to partake more of the nature of a course of lectures than a true text-book. In this it follows French rather than English or American precedent. Its relation to lectures makes it more diffuse than the author would have wished, but this is offered as an explanation, not an excuse. Addressed to medical students and not specialists the language employed is as untechnical as possible, and, indeed, was meant as a rule to be such as young physicians might use to their patients for suggestion purposes.
The historical portion is probably longer than some may deem necessary. The place of psychotherapy in the past seemed so important, however, and psychotherapeutics masqueraded under so many forms that an historical rГ©sumГ© of its many phases appeared the best kind of an introduction to a book which pleads for more extensive and more deliberate use of psychotherapy in our time. The historical portion was developed for the lectures on the history of medicine at Fordham and perhaps that fact helps to account for the space allotted to this section of the book.
So far as the author knows, this is the first time in the history of medicine that an attempt has been made to write a text-book of the whole subject of psychotherapy. We have had many applications of psychotherapeutics to functional and organic nervous and mental disease and also indirectly to nutritional diseases; but no one apparently has attempted to systematize the application of psychotherapeutic principles, not only to functional diseases, but specifically to all the organic diseases. A chapter on the use of mental influence in anesthesia was, during the course of the preparation of this volume, written for Dr. Taylor Gwathmey's text-book on Anesthesia, which is to appear shortly (Appletons).
No one knows better than the author how difficult is the subject and how liable to misunderstanding and abuse. He appreciates well, too, how almost hopeless it would be to make a perfectly satisfactory text-book of so large a subject at the first attempt. The present volume is founded, however, on considerable experience, on wide reading in the subject, and on much reflection on its problems. It is offered to those who are interested in the old new department of psychotherapy until a better one is available. The author's principal idea in the book has been to help students and practitioners of {viii} medicine to care for (curare) suffering men and women and not cases, to treat individual human beings, not compounds in which various chemical, physical and biological qualities have been observed, diligently enough and with noteworthy success, but incompletely as yet, and quite without the satisfying adequacy which it is to be hoped will result from future investigations.
James J. Walsh.
110 West Seventy-fourth Street,
New York City.
INTRODUCTION
To physicians who are students not alone of the manifestations of disease but also of the workings of human nature, there are few chapters in the history of medicine more interesting than those which record the welcome by each generation of the supposed advances in the treatment of disease. Each generation announced its cures for diseases, provided its remedies to relieve symptoms, and invented methods of treatment that seemed to put off the inevitable tendency toward dissolution. Yet few of these inventions and discoveries maintain their early r