It is just like the fight against venereal diseases.
To Hans Conrad Banziger
Dear Colleague, 26 November 1934
You will have discovered as I have done that the viewpoints of modern psychotherapy go far beyond the boundaries of medicine and have aroused an interest in the general public which is becoming
a menace.
No doubt you are also aware that Freud, despite his intense resistance to “wild” psychoanalysis, could not help trusting the competence of his medically unqualified daughter and even expressed very
heretical views in public about the medical future of psychoanalysis.
I am therefore of the opinion that doctors would do well to keep an eye on this trend.
For this reason I emphasized at the last Psychotherapeutic Congress in Nauheim how important it is that the non-medical movement should remain under the control of the doctor and that a fixed course
of studies and a fixed relation to the doctor should be prescribed for non-medical psychologists.
There are unquestionably a lot of cases who need psychological education although they cannot be assigned to any clinical group of neuroses.
There are also people who for that reason never visit the doctor but, if they belong to the Catholic Church, turn to the father confessor.
Perhaps such people make up the clientele of psychological counsellors.
As you very rightly surmise, among these people there are also definitely neurotic cases who for these and other reasons belong much more to the doctor.
If, then, doctors close their eyes from the start to the large psychological lay movement that already exists, the lay movement will not be suppressed, as experience has amply shown,
but will on the contrary be made independent of them.
In that way the doctor loses all control over the activity of lay therapists.
In my humble opinion a far-sighted policy would strive without reserve to establish a carefully normalized cooperation between lay psychologists and doctors in order to prevent quackery from running riot.
Medical psychology, however, like any other branch of the healing art, needs technical assistants who require a careful training.
Hence there is already a pedagogic therapy which with us, at least, does not lie in the hands of doctors but which they should know something about.
If doctors adopt the position of not wanting to know anything about these developments, they will one day be confronted with the fact that this development has passed over their heads.
On the basis of long experience l have come to the conclusion that one would do better to consolidate these dissident groups and if possible work out a normalization which would clearly delimit the
Various fields of work and facilitate the much needed medical control over the activities of non-medical psychologists.
I must now confess that I do not understand your reasons for holding aloof from these endeavours.
I think that under no circumstances is it appropriate to practise an ostrich policy with developments that are actually going on.
In Germany they are now trying to bring non-medical psychological work into a definite relationship with medicine, and this alone will make proper control possible.
In this respect it is just like the fight against venereal diseases: pushing prostitution out of sight in no wise prevents infection.
I do not find it so bad that mechanistic and hormonistic points of view are repudiated, for in the last resort we treat neuroses neither with mechanisms nor hormones but psychically, and at present the
idea that the psyche is a hormonal system still belongs to the realm of mythology.
Hence I am all for the psychotherapist calmly acknowledging that he treats and cures neither with diet nor pills nor with the surgeon’s knife.
With collegial regards,
Yours sincerely, C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 178-180.
