Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: disease; that is to say reactions which misadapt the individual to his environment and which result from normal functioning under conditions to which the individual is | not adapted. Functional disease is therefore a process of perverted functioning. Conversely psychotherapy makes use of these same principles or tendencies to re- adapt the individual to his environment, to re-educate him to healthy reactions. Psychotherapy simply makes use of the normal mechanism of the mind and body, of the physiological machinery to bring about a restitution of the disordered functions and restore the individual to health. Thus suggestion can only act by stimulating the physiological mechanism, it can only make use of machinery already provided; it cannot create anything anew, do anything that is not in accord with the laws of the nervous system. As a method psychotherapy is comparable in every way to what is now known as physiological therapeutics which has taken such an important place in modern treatment in internal medicine. I fear my exposition has been too brief to enable these principles to be clearly grasped by those who have not systematically studied and observed the phenomena of abnormal psychology. The field of investigation is a wide one, and to thoroughly comprehend the meaning of the facts that are to be observed one must make himself familiar with them at first hand as one would expect to do in bacteriology if he would understand the principles of infectious disease and immunity. The psychological principles I have attempted to elucidate may be summed up as: First, Complex formation; second, Conservatism; third, Dissociation; fourth, Automatism ; fifth, Emotional Energy. Each of these principles is made use of by psychotherapy in greater or less degree according to th...