
ee eee i 

1922.] The Ninth Indian Science Congress. L.8.C. It 
This is all I can find time to say here about Psychic 
Research, except that, in widening our outlook in regard to 
by the following taunt by J. Paterson-Smyth ! in his reference 
to spiritism and spiritualism :— 
‘We are a strange, dull people, we humans. An unthinking 
infinite eternities—and yet men pass into the Unseen as stupidly 
as the caterpillar on the cabbage-leaf, without curiosity or joy or 
wonder or excitement at the boundless career ahead.”’ 
PSYCHOTHERAPY 
Another aspect of psychical science, and one that has a 
more directly practical aim, is the use that the new psychology 
(as it is called) has been put to in medicine under the name of 
Psychotherapeutics, Psychotherapy or Psvcho-analysis. Here 
we come in touch with a novel method of treatment for the 
mentally deranged; a method that seems likely to open up an 
extensive field to experimental research. As we have a Medical 
Research Section in this Congress, I have less scruple in draw- 
ing attention to it in this address as being another borderland 
aspect of science now prominently in the public eye, since the 
war has left us with so many neuroses and psychoses as a sad 
legacy. Also it appears to be a fact (which I have on good 
authority) that many of the everyday disorders, which were 
ormerly regarded as originating on the physical side, are now 
known to be principally of psychogenetic origin—as is proved 
by their yielding to psychotherapeutic treatment, The prin- 
ciple of the treatment is based on the theory of the New Psycho- 
logy: that there is a constant war going on in the mind be- 
tween the primitive instincts (self-preservation and self-perpe- 
tuation) and what is known as our Herd instincts, derived from 
. 
our ideas and views founded on education, religion, social 
complex has usually considerable emotional force attached to it, 
which is constantly trying to discharge itself, and such dis- 


1 «On the Rim of the World, ” loc. cit., Vol. I, No. 3, p. 250. 
