You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dr. Mitchell says that those who hold the view that bodily or mental disorders are always preceded by bodily changes are introducing an unwarrantable metaphysical conclusion into the realm of science. The relations of body and mind
are better expressed in the language of everyday life, in which a close relationship is accepted. There is some justification for the view that physical conditions may be produced through psychic causes in the fact that suggestion may relieve them. On the other hand, if we believe in a true interaction between body and mind it is not necessary to hold that every bodily or mental disorder which can be relieved by influences acting through the mind must be psychogenic in origin.
The most important clues to a patient's illness are not within his recollection. They are dissociated. Re-association by suggestion under hypnosis was widely used in the war neuroses. In many cases some sort of mental analysis was necessary. Behind all the activity in the domain of mental analysis stood the body of doctrine associated with the name of Freud.
In regard to Freud's doctrine there was unity in accepting his theory of repression combined with the rejection of almost the whole body of doctrine erected on this foundation by him.
That a superficial analysis seemed to show that conflict and repression in which instincts other than the sexual were sufficient to account for the neuroses led many to the conclusion that the libido theory was false. Those who came to this conclusion seemed to have a strange eagerness to dissociate themselves from a sexual ætiology of the neuroses. An odd spectacle for men of science to be influenced by the idea that one explanation of natural phenomena could be more respectable than another.
Psycho-analysis throws, he says, an illuminating light upon uncritical rejection of what may prove to be scientific truth. If we can overcome our resistances to the libido theory of the neuroses we cannot fail to see and be astonished