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

Author : James Walsh
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781482780123
Total Pages : 818 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (81 download)

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Download or read book Psychotherapy written by James Walsh and published by . This book was released on 2013-03-15 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historical portion is probably longer than some may deem necessary.The place of psychotherapy in the past seemed so important, however, and psychothcrapeutics masqueraded under so many forms that an historical resume of its many phases appeared the best kind of an introduction to a book which pleads for more extensive and morc 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 misunderatanding 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 medicine to care for (curare) Buffering 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.Religion and psychotherapy have, of late, come to have many relations to each other and many interests in common, at least in the minds of a number of clergymen, and in popular estimation. There is no doubt but that religion can do much to soothe troubled men and women, even when their troubles are entirely physical in nature and origin. It at least lessens the unfavorable effect of worry in exaggerating such pathological processes as are at work. All diseases, functional and organic, are rendered worse by solicitude, while many troublesome symptoms become quite bearable if only the patient does not dwell on them too much but takes them as they come, carefully refraining from emphasizing them by over-attention. That is the very essence of psychotherapy. Religion, in the sense of trust in divine wisdom, can do much to originate and maintain this imperturbed frame of mind. People who are without religion, that is, without the feeling that somehow all their ills are a part of the great plan of the universe, the mystery of which is insoluble, but the recognition of which is demanded by reason, and who lack the assurance that somehow, in Browning's phrase: "God's In His Heaven- All's right with the world!"