9. Treatment*

While the ideas discussed in the previous lectures can be traced back to the influence that Freud exerts on me, the following investigations into medical treatment derive from a doctor the like of whom I have never encountered again in forty years of medical practice: Ernst Schweninger. All my knowledge and all my skill I owe to him. I do not claim that what I am going to say today is a faithful reproduction of what Schweninger thought and taught but what my brains made of it. I know of no shorter and clearer way to present the aims of our profession than by using the expressions into which he cast the articles of the belief that he held on to with the naivety of genius.

‘Man is the product of his living conditions in the broadest sense of the word: if the product is to be changed then the factors which produce it have to be changed’; this statement was the guiding line Schweninger followed in his therapy. As a young man I did not understand the profound meaning of it; in those days I confused the term living conditions with another term, namely living environment, which Schweninger never used; I believed that one should change the patient's circumstances of life, his environment, if one followed Schweninger's doctrine. But this was just what Schweninger did not want; he said and meant living conditions, and conditions always require at least two things that are related to each other. A change in somebody's living conditions can be effected in three ways: either by changing the external world, the environment — this is the way which is shown to students at the universities and which the physician usually takes, and believes he takes even when his unconscious, his demon leads him a different way; or by changing the human being — as psychoanalysis does — and