Page:Freud - Selected papers on hysteria and other psychoneuroses.djvu/191

Rh but by the doctor, to wit, by the personality of the physician in so far as it exerts a psychic influence. I am well aware, gentlemen, that you like very much the idea which the asthete Vischer, in his parody on Faust (Faust, der Tragödie, III Teil) endowed with a classical expression: "I know that the physical often acts on the moral."

But would it not be more adequate and frequently more correct to influence the moral part of the person with the moral, that is, with psychic means?

There are many ways and means of psychotherapy. All methods are good which produce the aim of the therapy. Our usual consolation, "You will soon be well again," with which we are so generous to our patients, corresponds to one of the psychotherapeutic methods, only that on gaining a profounder insight into the neuroses we are not forced to limit ourselves to this consolation alone. We have developed the technique of hypnotic suggestion, of psychotherapy through diversion, through practice, and through the evocation of serviceable affects. I do not disdain any of them, and would practice them all under suitable conditions. That I have in reality restricted myself to a single therapeutic procedure, to the method called by Breuer "cathartic," which I prefer to call "analytic," is simply due to subjective motives which guided me. Having participated in the elaboration of this therapy I feel it a personal duty to devote myself to its investigation, and to the final development of its technique. I maintain that the analytic method of psychotherapy is one which acts most penetratingly, and carries farthest; through it one can produce the most prolific changes in the patient. If I relinquish for a moment the therapeutic point of view, I can assert that it is the most interesting, and that it alone teaches us something concerning the origin and the connection of the morbid manifestations. Owing to insights which it opens for us into the mechanism of the psychic malady, it can even lead us beyond itself, and show us the way to still other kinds of therapeutic influences.

Allow me now to correct some errors, and furnish some explanations concerning this cathartic or analytic method of psycho-therapy.

(a) I notice that this method is often mistaken for the