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The essay by Dr. Jolowicz is written from a broadminded and essentially clinical point of view. He recognizes the mental aspect and its value in all modes of therapy, but does not assume that psychotherapy always plays the effective rôle in treatment; he is quite willing to regard this as a
secondary factor in many physical disorders. Suggestion, he considers, leaves the psyche time to adjust the organism gradually to what is completed by other methods.
This consideration holds good in every kind of treatment—arsenic injections, to take his example, spa bathing, massage, etc. It is right that the doctor should be ever alive to the psychic factor. Perhaps Dr. Jolowicz is inclined to take too superficial a view of this factor in pointing out that a bathing cure is recommended when he finds that the home surroundings are acting unfavourably; it is obvious that the writer is psychologically acute enough to know what are the unfavourable influences, and he might have given his less psychologically-minded readers an indication of their nature.
The suggestion factor, he asserts, is present in every psychologic technique; it is confessedly involved in the process of transference: he contends, however, with the utmost emphasis, that suggestion by itself does not account for the value of these forms of treatment. It would have been helpful if Dr. Jolowicz had pointed out wherein lies the difference, which must have then led him on to some theoretical explanation of suggestion.
He contends that there is no psychotherapeutic method without suggestive factors (better perhaps where suggestion is not involved in some stage or other of treatment), but also that there is no purely suggestive method. Dr. Jolowicz is an eclectic in treatment for which justification can be advanced; happily he is apparently no eclectic in his pathology.
The second essay in the book by Dr. Gustav Heyer on hypnosis contains nothing that will not be found in the available books in English on the prac