SUGGESTION AS A HABIT-BREAKER. THE PSYCHOLOGIC INTERPRETATION OF ALCOHOLIC INTEMPERANCE AND ITS PHYSIOPSYCHIC TREATMENT

The intoxication motives furnish another field for psychological study. There are two great themes clearly expressed: One the glorification of pleasure and abandon, the love of exaggeration and excess, and praise of the abundant life; the other portrays the desire to escape from pain, to drown sorrow, and to rest. But no measurable quality of either mental or physical work is as such improved to any practical extent by alcohol. It is interesting and significant that the effect is upon the feeling of power, rather than upon the energies themselves. Alcohol causes changes in the intensity of consciousness, and this is the secret of its influence. Dr. G. E. PARTRIDGE, Clark University.

Present-day medicine no longer knows the division of human beings into two classes, the healthy and the sick, but deals only with individuals, no two of whom are precisely the same and each one of whom must be treated in accordance with his own individuality.

Dr. GEORGE W. JACOBY.

(This applies nowhere with greater appositeness than to the treatment of alcoholics. The up-to-date physician treats patients, not diseases. Routinism is the bane of therapeutics.)

It is entirely an individual proposition.

BLYTHE.

VII

SUGGESTION AS A HABIT-BREAKER.

CHOLOGIC INTERPRETATION OF ALCOHOLIC

INTEMPERANCE AND ITS

TREATMENT

Ο

THE PSY

PHYSIOPSYCHIC

NE of the most important applications of psychodynamics is its combination with rational physical attention in the treatment of drink and drug habits. The results here obtained are without parallel, dependent as they are on the automatic operation of a superphysical control rendered active by a resistless appeal. The drink and drug cures so extensively advertised fail utterly to impart the great essential to radical regeneration and lasting abstinence—viz., spontaneous, undesisting moral sway. They evoke not those forces of the soul that are a thousand times stronger than appetite or desire. Hence about seventy per cent. of drinkers who seek relief at the sanatoriums are sobered only for a time and sooner or later relapse. The drink habit cannot be cured by nauseating the victim with lobelia, purging him

with drastic cathartics, blinding him with belladonna, or vomiting him with apomorphia. Such treatment creates a revulsion in the patient. He soon recovers from the effect of the physic used, to find his craving unchanged and his powers of resistance as foisonless as ever. Drug cures leave the moral nature uninfluenced. Dr. Partridge convincingly contends that no drug can reach the heart of the intoxication impulse.

To all such treatment, which turns absolutely on the faith of the patient, how incomparably superior must be that which enthrones the image of the Eternal in the man, the god part which stands behind that faith and makes it possible. This elevation of the Ego to sovereign and consummate power is what exalted suggestion accomplishes. In the author's experience, covering twelve hundred cases of alcoholic inebriety, and according to reports in foreign medical journals, at least eighty per cent. of those who accept it may be saved; and if all who seek transfigurement could be persuaded to carry out unremittingly the directions given until the damage done the brain can be repaired, that percentage might be raised to one hundred. Of the twelve hundred cases treated psychovitally by the author, twenty per cent. seemingly failed to respond. Of these a number cannot be traced; a number indifferently submitted to