ABSTRACT
IN the foregoing pages the importance of psycho-analysis as an instrument of psychological investigation has been emphasized, and the illumination which it has brought into the dark places of the mind and the light which it has thrown on the mechanisms and forces through which the psychoneuroses arise and are maintained, should lead us to expect that it may be found equally valuable as a therapeutic measure. And this is, indeed, the conclusion to which all our experience of mental therapeutics in recent years has brought us. Only when we understand how a psychoneurosis has arisen, and what forces are at work in maintaining it, are we able to understand how it ever gets cured. It is true that cure is often effected by other measures, but our understanding of how such cures are brought about was vague and unsatisfying until it became possible to bring to our aid the insight conferred by knowledge of psycho-analytic doctrines. It is therefore advisable to examine the principles of psycho-analysis as a therapeutic measure before considering other methods which have been in the past, and still are, very widely employed. In doing so we must, to a large extent, reverse the historical order in which knowledge of these matters has come to us.
