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And, in the third place, Gentlemen, I would remind you of the well-established fact that certain diseases, in particular the psychoneuroses, are far more readily accessible to mental influences than to any other form of medication. It is not a modern dictum but an old saying of physicians that these diseases are not cured by the drug but by the physician, that is, by the personality of the physician, inasmuch as through it he exerts a mental influence. I am well aware that you favour the view which Vischer, the professor of aesthetics, expressed so well in his parody of Faust:

Ich weiß, das Physikalische

Wirkt öfters aufs Moralische¹

But would it not be more to the point to say - and is it not more often the case - moral (that is, mental) means can influence a man’s moral side?

There are many ways and means of practising psychotherapy. All that lead to recovery are good. Our usual word of comfort, which we dispense so liberally to our patients - ‘You’ll soon be all right again’ -, corresponds to one of these psychotherapeutic methods; but now that we have deeper insight into the neuroses, we are no longer obliged to confine ourselves to the word of comfort. We have developed the technique of hypnotic suggestion, and psychotherapy by mental distraction, by exercise, and by eliciting suitable affects. I despise none of these methods and would use them all in appropriate circumstances. If I have actually come to confine myself to one form of treatment, to the method which Breuer called cathartic, but which I myself prefer to call ‘analytic’, it is because I have allowed myself to be influenced by purely subjective motives. Because of the part I have played in founding this therapy, I feel a personal obligation to devote myself to closer investigation of it and to the development of its technique. And I may say that the analytic method of psychotherapy is the one that penetrates most deeply and carries farthest, the one by means of which the most extensive transformations can be effected in patients. Putting aside for a moment the therapeutic point of view, I may also say of it that it is the most interesting method, the only one which informs us at all about the origin and inter-relation of morbid phenomena. Owing to the insight which we gain into mental illness by this method, it alone should be capable of leading us beyond its own limits and of pointing out the way to other forms of therapeutic influence.

¹ [I know that the physical

Often influences the moral.]