ABSTRACT
It is the urgent psychic problems of patients, much more than the questions put by scientific workers, which have given effective impetus to the newer developments in medical psychology and psychotherapy. The science of medicine has avoided all contact with strictly psychic problems. Psychiatry, for example, helped itself out of the treasure-chest of experimental psychology and funded its borrowings in that inclusive body of knowledge called psychopathology—a general name for the study of complex psychic manifestations. Psychopathology is built for one part upon the findings of psychiatry in the strict sense of the term, and for the other upon the findings of neurology—a field of study which originally embraced the so-called psychogenetic neuroses, and still does so in academic parlance. The unmistakable feature of the neuroses is the fact that their causes are psychic, and that their cure depends entirely upon psychic methods of treatment.
