We stand in the midst of this vigorous and
healthy movement, which has had a stimulating effect on theoretical
psychology itself.
We find a similar situation in the sphere of the physician. He could
not pass by the new science of the mind without instinctively feeling
that his medical diagnosis and therapy could be furthered in many
directions by the experimental method. Not only the psychiatrist and
nerve specialist, but in a certain sense every physician had made use
of a certain amount of psychology in his professional work. He had
always had to make clear to himself the mental experiences of the
patient, to study his pain sensations and his feelings of comfort,
his fears and his hopes, his perceptions and his volitions, and to a
certain degree he had always tried to influence the mental life of the
patient, to work on him by suggestion and to help him by stimulating
his mind. But as far as a real description and explanation of such
mental experiences came in question, all remained a dilettantic
semi-psychology which worked with the most trivial conceptions of
popular thinking. The medical men recognized the disproportion between
the exactitude of their anatomical, physiological, and pathological
observation and the superficiality of their self-made psychology. Thus
the desire arose in their own medical circle to harmonize their
psychological means of diagnosis and therapy with the schemes of
modern scientific psychology.
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