The Story of the Mind (Paperback)

Excerpt: ...such as suggestion, arousing of expectation, faith, etc., may not be more helpful here, when wisely employed, than in troubles which do not involve the mind; but yet the end to be attained is a physical as well as a mental cure, and the means in the present state of knowledge, at any rate, are mainly physical means. The psychologist knows practically nothing about the laws which govern the influence of mind on body. The principle of Suggestion is so obscure in its concrete working that the most practised and best-informed operators find it impossible to control its use or to predict its results. To give countenance, in this state of things, to any pretended system or practice of mind cure, Christian science, spiritual healing, etc., which leads to the neglect of ordinary medical treatment, is to discredit the legitimate practice of medicine and to let loose an enemy dangerous to the public health. Moreover, such things produce a form of hysterical subjectivism which destroys sound judgment, and dissolves the sense of reality which it has taken modern science many generations to build up. Science has all along had to combat such wresting of its more obscure and unexplained facts into alliance with the ends of practical quackery, fraud, and superstition; and psychologists need just now to be especially alive to their duty of combating the forms of this alliance which arise when the newer results of psychology are so used, whether it be to supplement the inadequate evidence of "thought-transference," to 121 support the claims of spiritualism, or to justify in the name of "personal liberty" the substitution of a "healer" for the trained physician. The parent who allows his child to die under the care of a "Christian Science healer" is as much a criminal from neglect as the one who, going but a step further in precisely the same direction, brings his child to starvation on a diet of faith. In France and Russia experimenting in hypnotism on well persons...