A careful mathematical calculation of the number of hours required to cure a psychosis by this new prophylaxis reveals an alarming disproportion between the minute number of physicians available, and the incalculable number of patients requiring their ministrations. One of the most ardent devotees of the new method is a practitioner who, according to the testimony of a confrère, enters upon his daily endurance test at 9 A. M. and without any luncheon psychoanalyzes continuously until 7 P. M. As the ordinary patient is supposed to require three hours a week of this treatment, for about five months, the doctor can, by working ten hours a day, treat twenty patients in one week, or allowing him two months vacation in summer (and he will need it) handle forty patients in one year. This, alas, is but a drop of medicine in the bucket of disease, and unless, by some homeopathic adaptation of the five-hundredth-dilution principle, we can make our medicine go farther it is only a limited number of the rich and leisure class who can ever be cured by these new methods. This is the prostrating situation that confronts the humanitarian—a little group of healers bravely but hopelessly taking up arms against a sea of mental troubles.
One cannot help wondering whether such exhaustive thoroughness is really essential. It seems sometimes to the disillusioned seeker after truth that the relation of the conscious life history, the revelation of the unconscious through dreams, the display of the mental processes through “free association,” are but the hocus-pocus devised for keeping up the conversation between the analyst and the analyzed—a crude, clumsy, masculine technique for discovering, by somewhat labyrinthine methods, the essence of the personal quality of an individual. Might not this be obvious in a few hours of ordinary intercourse to a person of intuition, practised in the art of plucking the heart out of a mystery, instead of chopping up the whole anatomy to get at it?
The expenditure of time and effort and money required to gain the occult ends of what seems like a blind and blundering process, is certainly colossal. What the patient puts into it is comparatively unimportant. A fool and his money might as well be parted sooner as later, and the time of the patient, especially in the state of depression in which he ordinarily seeks treatment, is worth so little that killing it is as good a use as any to make of it. But think of the physician—a man of parts, of much general and special education, who has added to a large professional equipment the complicated technique of a laborious method that only a German thoroughness gone stark and staring mad, could perpetrate on a makeshift world, which, with all its failings, has not lost its sense of humor or its perception of the relative value of things mundane, and does still discriminate between time and eternity. Think of a first rate mind expending itself for hours on end in the minute scrutiny of some trivial neurotic mentality, probably as like as two peas to thousands of other equally insignificant particles of matter that pass for individual organisms.
If indeed the interest in another personality is the essence of the “cure,” one is tempted to ask why these egocentric erotomaniacs should not derive the same and mutual benefit from interesting themselves in one another? Why not pair them off, male and female as originally created, and embark them together on this ark of refuge from the deluge of the common life in which they are drowning? Let them sit by the hour, the day, the week, and talk about their “souls,” relate to each other’s absorbed attention their life history, interpret each other’s dreams, and join in the freest of “free association.” Let the blind lead the blind, the sick heal the sick, the erotic love the erratic, and silly soul mate with silly soul, leaving the authentic souls of the doctors to be saved from stultification, and their talents used for the benefit of human beings who are really and truly suffering.
But, alas, there seems to be no such easy panacea for mortal ills: for to attain its ends the process must apparently be presided over by a superior if not superhuman intelligence. And the patient, if scientifically or benevolently minded, can take comfort in the thought that his case is perhaps sufficiently different from any hitherto handled to enable the investigator to benefit almost as much as the patient by the experience. Perhaps the months that the biddable patient who has overcome his “resistances” devotes to coöperating with the scientific explorer, may be reduced to weeks in the treatment of the next like-minded individual who submits himself for treatment by the more practised practitioner. I recall my despairing comment upon a doctor’s tale of the case that it took two thousand hours to cure, and the reassuring response that, now that the technique had been worked out and published, any competent person could turn the trick in from one-tenth to one-twentieth of the time.
The psychoanalytic approach to mental prophylaxis is perhaps still, after twenty years of groping progress, in the experimental stage. The few bold spirits who have braved the ridicule of their conservative confrères, and left the main travelled roads, are hardy pioneers blazing trails and treading out paths that will in time be easy traveling. It is inevitable that in the delicate operations by which these spiritual sawbones are mastering the mystery of this new art of the vivisection of the soul, they should sometimes cause pain or even cut in the wrong place. But they are inspired by a very human sympathy for their victim-beneficiaries, and are rapidly learning their way about the spiritual anatomy, and discovering the skillful use of mental anæsthetics.
The strangest thing about this extraordinary process is that it really does cure the mind diseased. Where and what, one asks, and continues to ask, is the nexus between treatment and cure. Has any patient, however completely recovered, ever found out? Do the practitioners of this occult ritual know themselves, or have they simply hit on a practical technique, without a comprehension of a rational philosophical basis for its major operations? Is this like early groping experiments with “animal magnetism,” or mysterious forms of electricity which brought results long before an understanding of the reason of their success was arrived at? However this may be, it still remains true that, judged by its results, the new method, however dark and devious, must still be acknowledged to have attained a success, not sporadic and accidental, but continuous, consistent and increasing, and apparently, though incomprehensibly, connected as effect to cause with the procedure which has been sketched, or shall I say caricatured, in the foregoing pages.