PSYCHOTHERAPY.
Early Magic and Incubation (§ 1).
The Middle Ages and Later (§ 2).
Mesmer (§3).
Bertrand and Elliotson (§4).
Braid, Li^bault, Bernheim, and Tuke (§ 5).
Recent Movements in the United States (§ 6).
The Emmanuel Movement (§ 7).
The term psychotherapy (Gk. Psyche, " soul," and therapeuein, " to heal "), taken largely, denotes the treatment of disease through the influence of mental, moral, and spiritual states upon the body. An exhaustive discussion of the subject would involve an examination of many crude and fantastic theories, partly theological, partly metaphysical or psychological, with which the fundamental ideas of psychotherapy have been connected. The purpose of this article is to sketch briefly the history of psychotherapy, and to state the main principles which underlie it in the scientific form that it has assumed to-day.
In one fashion or another, psychotherapy has been
practised, consciously or unconsciously, not only
by all medical men, but also by those who in pre-
medical times played the part both of
i. Early priest and of physician. It rests upon Magic and what has become the fundamental Incubation, dogma of modern physiological psychology— the idea that mind and body constitute a unity, that for every thought and feeling, however slight, there is a corresponding nervous event, and that the smallest physical process awakens an echo in the psychical realm. The charms and incantations both of savage and of civilized man are simply forms of self-suggestion, which has, in certain types of disease, curative power. The earliest historical notices of healing through mental influence are to be found in the magical texts of ancient Egypt (cf. G. Ebers, Papyros Ebers, das hermetische Buck uber die Arzneimittel der alten Aegyptern, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1875). As early as about 1600 B.C. it was the custom in Egypt to heal
Psychotherapy
THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
diseases by touching the person diseased, while various incantations were being uttered; it is known also that certain formulas pronounced over the images of divinities were believed to impart to these images the power of dispelling the poison of serpents. Among the most ancient of Egyptian myths are those of the healing of Ra by the goddess Isis, and of the healing of Horus, the son of Isis, by Thoth, in virtue of certain words supposed to have magical power (E. Naville, The Old Egyptian Faith, p. 5, London, 1909). In virtue of the same principle, kings and priests and reformers, under all religions and with every variety of metaphysical and theological creed, have wrought what seemed to their contemporaries to be nothing less than deeds of miraculous healing. In Alexandria, on the testimony of Suetonius, Tacitus, and Dion Cassius, the Roman Emperor Vespasian healed a blind man by touching his eyes with spittle. In the Old Testament the great prophetic figures Elijah, Elisha, and Isaiah were psychotherapeutists. David was able to charm away the melancholia of Saul by the strains of a music the echo of which may be heard in some modern hospitals for the insane.
The inscriptions dug up in our own time at Epidauros, the site of the famous shrine of ^Esculapius, the patron divinity of the healing art, show what a great part the mind played in the cures effected. For example, a sufferer from dyspepsia, one Marcus Julius Apellas, who had been cured in the temple, set up an inscription in gratitude to the god. After mentioning some physical remedies which the god prescribed, Apellas continues:
" When I called upon the god to cure me more quickly I thought it was as if I had anointed my whole body with mustard and salt and had come out of the secret hall and gone in the direction of the bath-house, while a small child was going before, holding a smoking censer. The priest said to me, ' Now you are cured ; but you must pay up the fees for your treatment.' I acted according to the vision, and when I rubbed myself with salt and mustard I felt the pains still, but when I had bathed I suffered no longer. These events took place in the first nine days after I had come to the temple. The god also touched my right hand and my breast " (Mary Hamilton, Incubation, p. 41, London, 1906; [Epidauros and its cures are treated in pp. 8-43 of Miss Hamilton's work]). This inscription probably belongs to the second century of our era. Speaking of the same period S. Dill remarks (Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 459, London, 1904): " The temples of ^Esculapius arose in every land where Greek or Roman culture prevailed. Patients came from all parts of the Greco- Roman world. The temples had dormitories; retreats often contained beds for 200 or 300 persons."
During the Middle Ages the science of therapeutics was in bondage to superstition. The church was supposed to have a monopoly of the healing power. Fragments of the cross, the teart of the Virgin Mary and of St. Peter, the hair of martyrs, iron filings from the chains that had bound Peter and Paul, were regarded as miraculously efficacious in the cure of disease. Great personalities, such as the founders of cloisters, or persons of great sanctity,
such as Francis of Assisi, Catharine of Siena, and Bernard of Clairvaux (qq.v.), it was claimed, healed
multitudes by the power of their touch.
2. The In France from medieval times down
Middle Ages to the age of Charles X. the kings
and Later, claimed the gift of " touching for the
evil " (scrofula). In the Anglican prayer-book there was printed down to the year 1719, " The Office for Touching." The actual ceremony is described by Evelyn in his Diary (ed. W. Bray, in Memoirs, London, 1818-19; by Upcott, 1827; by H. B. Wheatley, 4 vols., 1879) under date July 6, 1660. Among the famous persons touched for the evil was Samuel Johnson, in the reign of Queen Anne.
The short and easy way of dealing with these stories was to reject them as superstitious legends. Modern investigation, however, has shown that this method is quite too drastic, and that thus to deal with human testimony is to make the search for historical truth almost futile. The generally received view to-day is that the principle by which these phenomena were brought about is what is called " Suggestion," or expectant attention; and it may be said that in all modern mental healing systems these psychological influences play a dominating role. It was only in the eighteenth century that the foundations for a scientific understanding of the subject were laid. Just as chemistry arose out of alchemy, and astronomy out of astrology, and the science of internal medicine out of the tentative therapeutic efforts of the medicine man, so modern scientific psychotherapy takes its origin in mesmerism.
Friedrich (or Franz) Anton Mesmer (b. at Iznang, 11 m. n.w. of Constance, May 23, 1733; graduated at Vienna in medicine, taking for his thesis, " On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body,"
published in 1766; d. at Meersburg, 5 3. Mesmer. m. e. of Constance, Mar. 5, 1815) first
came into notice in 1773 by his novel method of curing disease through the application of magnetized plates to the human body. He was an ardent student of the medieval mystics, Paracelsus and the Rosicrucians (q.v.), from whom he obtained the idea that there existed in nature a mysterious and subtle force which he called " animal magnetism." This he conceived to be an invisible fluid, which by a skilled hand could be so manipulated as to heal all manner of diseases. Some of the methods by which he applied his theory he owed probably to Father Gassner, a German priest who cured sufferers by means of exorcism, his theory being that the given disease was due to demon possession. In short, it may be said that Mesmer found all the elements of mesmerism already in existence. He simply deprived them of their mystical setting, reduced them to terms of matter and force, and thus commended them to the age of reason. Mesmer appeared in Paris in 1778, and in a short time created a sensation by his wonderful cures in all classes of society. He believed that magnetism could be imparted to wood, glass, iron, and other physical objects, and that these in turn could communicate the magnetism to the sick person. Hence he constructed his famous baqucl, an