Furthermore, it must be observed that these are the cases in which psychotherapy, whether practised by means of the placebo, or through the agency of christian science, or the Emmanuel movement, is preeminently successful.
In the second place, if we study carefully the causes of these conditions, we shall find them in the two great classes into which Charcot has divided them. “The neuroses,” he says, “arise from two factors, the one essential and invariable, neuropathic heredity; the other, contingent and polymorphic, the provoking agent.”
In the latter belong our doubts and fears and worries, as well as the other more easily controlled factors in the causation of these purely functional nervous disorders. But even in the case of heredity, it is more the unstable nervous equilibrium that is transmitted than the specific form in which it is manifested in any individual case; and this unstable equilibrium is capable, in no small degree, of being influenced by reeducation along the lines of which we have been speaking.
“In neurasthenia," says Dubois, “we find general debility; sometimes it is physical, sometimes intellectual, but above all it is moral.” In other words, it is a wrong view-point, a weakness of the will power of the individual, an inability to throw off the unduly insistent habit, or thought, or motive.
In a few words, Carpenter explains the long list of epidemic delusions of history, the form of which has changed from time to time, although many of their characteristics have been common to all; such as mesmerism, magnetism, spiritualism and the like, by saying that “The condition which underlies them all is the subjection of the mind to a dominant idea.”
The trouble is that in the case of these delusions, as well as in the case of the neurasthenic, the dominant idea is pointed in the wrong direction; and the Emmanuel movement simply aims by a process of reeducation through suggestion, autosuggestion or, if necessary, hypnotism, to change this direction.
In the treatment of these cases of functional disorder of the nervous system, doctors, psychologists and Emmanuelists, all agree in attempting to continue the subjection of the mind to a dominant idea; but try, each in his own way, to make that idea stand for health, for right living and right thinking, for cheerfulness, in a word, so to direct it that it shall always look for the doughnut, not the hole.
But, while agreeing thus far, a fundamental difference of opinion is disclosed, as soon as we take up the question as to by whom this work can best be done; by the doctor or by the clergyman. The lines, however, are not strictly drawn between the two professions, because some medical men see no impropriety in asking and encouraging the assistance of the church, while many churchmen deprecate the entrance
