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The psychic treatment of nervous disorders
The psychic treatment of nervous disorders Author:Paul Dubois 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: CHAPTER III Rational Basis of Psychotherapy — Education of the Reason — Dualiitic Spiritualism — Psychophysical Parallelism—Mgr. d'Hulst—Different Opinions Co... more »ncerning the Bond of Affinity between the Mind and the Body—Practical Philosophy Founded on Biological Observation — The Importance of the Problems of Liberty, of Will, and of Responsibility There is something further and better to do, but, to be efficacious, the treatment of psychoneuroses must be—and I can not repeat it too often—psychic before anything else. The object of treatment ought to be to make the patient master of himself; the means to this end is the education of the will, or, more exactly, of the reason. But, it will be said, this declaration is frankly spiritualistic in its nature. Thus to give the first place to the moral influence over the physical is to return to the dual spiritualism of philosophy, it is to fall back to the nosographical point of view, in the narrow conception of neuroses considered as diseases without physical foundation, morbi sine materia. I repudiate both these reproaches. The study of biology brings before us a constant parallelism between psychic phenomena and cerebral functions. The most ardent defenders of spiritualism do not dream of combating this statement. They easily find, among Protestant writers, thinkers ready to accept these premises, but their testimony may appear open to suspicion; it is tainted with bold inquiry. I prefer to draw from a more orthodox source. A Catholic prelate, Mgr. d'Hulst,1 expresses himself very clearly on this subject: " We have all been brought up to admire a doctrine of which the author is M. de Bonald, but the inspirer Descartes:The soul is an intelligence served by the organs. The least fault of this definition is its g...« less