Long clinical experience has conclusively proven that for the homoeopathic treatment, regardless of the type of the illness, the characteristic emotional and mental traits of the patient himself represent the most practical guide towards the selection of the effective medicine. In the experiment upon healthy individuals, that medicine must have reproduced not only a state similar to the physical illness but also a picture of the very emotional and temperamental traits of the patient. This verified empirical rule would imply that the happenings, both on the psycho-emotional, as well as on the organo-physiological level, are among the fundamental elements behind what to us presents itself as disease. In the sense that both psychic and somatic elements are involved, we may be entitled to look upon most every disorder as a psychosomatic one.
Thus, encouraged by our clinical approach, we may be tempted into the generalization that perchance every such disturbance could be dealt with simply by prescribing a medicine selected on the basis of its psychosomatic similarity; we may expect that medicine always to remove the whole pathology, both psychic and somatic, thus entirely doing away with the need for any psychotherapeutic approaches. Those claims have actually arisen in our midst and they are backed up by many instances of actual therapeutic success in mental diseases as well as in physical disorders with attending emotional symptoms. Yet, alas, life is not so simple that any one single approach could encompass the great variety of its phenomena.
Every prescriber who is but willing to admit to himself the unpleasant truth may look back upon a goodly number of patients who, with or without the guideposts of marked mental symptoms, have failed to show a lasting response to the similimum, both psycho-emotionally or physically. PArticularly, those patients who show a strong emotional background and thus furnish what we would consider the most excellent mental guiding symptoms for exact prescribing not infrequently shock us by this most conspicuous failure of response to the remedy.
It is as though their very psychological impasse presented a barrier to a permanent restoration of health, ever had again re-establishing pathology after but temporary improvements. Thus, we have to face up to an utterly paradoxical situation. The patients mentals,” namely his psychological status, in some cases furnish the foremost leads for a successful therapeutic prescription, yet in other cases these same “mentals” may be met as obstacles to recovery.
In order to gain a viewpoint from which these contradictory facts can be related to each other as differing aspects of one fundamental phenomenon, a basic consideration of the interrelation of biologic and psychic functions will have to be attempted.
When we think of the psyche we frequently tend to explain its function as purely biologic or physiochemical processes. The fact that our psychological biologic dynamism is so strongly motivated by basic instincts as hunger, self-preservation and sexuality, which, in turn, are dependent on hormonal and autonomic nervous activities, supports this attitude. However, in a similar fashion the life processes themselves are interdependent with physical and chemical processes in their turn and yet are not identical with them. Also life cannot be understood by considering it mere complicated chemistry; rather it has to be taken as a qualitatively different basic phenomenon in itself which is served by chemistry and in turn is dependent on its servant, but not identical with it.
Similarly, psychic processes are interwoven with biologic functions and instincts, but the peculiar human qualities of consciousness, of willing and thinking even against the instinctual demands, are new and distinctive entities. They evolve out of purely animalic life, yet follow different laws of their own. Even within the very psychic processes themselves an analogous further differentiation takes place, as modern depth psychology has shown; the unconscious and automatic functions become related to an ego center and thus attain an entirely new quality, consciousness.
Summarizing, we have a peculiar chain of facts: chemistry by becoming more complicated, borders into life. Life, on the one side, has the aspect of highly evolved chemistry; on the other hand, it represents an entirely different, new entity which is not chemistry. Biologic functioning, through hormonal and nervous activity, manifests itself in the instinctual drives which, on the one side, are highly differentiated biologic functions, yet in their psychic differentiation represent something entirely new and different.
Out of the instincts evolves psychic existence culminating in an ego consciousness, a cumulative refinement resulting in the emergence of a new quality. This chain of evolution we see further continued when we realize that even our ego consciousness finds itself confronted with an entity which we feel as contained in our soul, on the one side, and yet, on the other hand, superordinated and above our personal existence and thus different from ourselves. With varying names we have called it ethical, moral, divine, spirit, God immanent (as our highest evolutionary center) and God transcendent (as we experience it apart from ourselves).
Thus, evolution seems to advance, on the one side, in a continuous chain; on the other hand, by introducing ever new and diversified variations, on different levels. Each of these is distinct and unique in itself; and yet there are also repertory patterns, mutual interactions as well as continuous transformations of impulses and energies, from the various levels to each other.
This phenomenon of homogeneous continuity through discontinuous differentiated entities, like and yet different, might leave us in a hopeless logical impasse, were it not for the fact that we may profit from the experience of modern physic which successfully dealt with an analogous situation. The nearest example is the theory of light, which is considered to be of a continuous, is the theory of light, which is considered to be of a continuous, vibratory, yet at the same time of a discontinuous, corpuscular nature, these logically contradictory explanations proving to be mutually complementary in terms of mathematics and practical experience.
Applicable to our problem is the fact that long and short waves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, Roentgen and radium (gamma) rays represent different and diversified qualities, yet, at the same time, are but variations of same basic, though, in its essential nature, unknown energy. Evidencing a continuous chain of phenomenal uniformity which we called spectrum, the various elements of the spectrum nevertheless represent essentially different qualities with different phenomenological laws and effects.
C.G. Jung [ C.G. JUNG: Der Geist der Psychologie. Eranos Jahrbuch, 1946, Rhein Verlag, Zuerich] first drew attention to the analogy between the above phenomenology in physics and the findings of analytical psychic elements, conscious psyche and representations of basic spiritual patterns (referred to as archetypes), all of them qualitatively unique entities yet on different levels, as it were representing analogous, quasi-repetitory phenomena.
As a practical working hypothesis, we might adopts this comparison with a spectral band and extend it through the whole of psychosomatic existence from an organic functioning through biochemistry, from biologic life processes through instincts and the realm of the psyche. Just as in the radiation spectrum the visible light is that part which alone is accessible to our direct perception, in the human spectrum, consciousness, like an isolated reception, in the human spectrum, consciousness, like an isolated island, borders on the “invisible” unconscious elements above and below.
As visible light flows into the invisible infrared and thence into short waves and long waves below, and into ultraviolet, leading to high frequency energy above, so the “visible,” conscious psyche flows below into the unconscious of the instincts which lead on to biology and chemistry, and above into the ethical and religious experience leading into the realm of the spirit. In a simplified way we thus may consider the physiologic functioning the bottom layer of the unconscious.
However, the human spectrum is not static and two dimensional but moves on in never-ending evolutional changes which include the space (central versus peripheral manifestation) as well as time factor (coexistence of past factors as well as future trends in a given symptom picture). This fascinating quality of four dimensionality would however, exceed the limit of our subject were we to discuss it now.
The evolutional changes are characterized by slow progressions and regressions, as well as by rather tempestuous concentrations of energy, alternating with phases of comparative calm, Ever and again, there is an emergence of what we may liken to storm centers of accumulated energy with subsequent release of tension, when a forward step has been enforced or the strength of the impulse has spent itself. To our subjective experience, such storm centers present themselves as physiologic or Psychologie disturbances. Their symptoms depend upon the area of the “spectrum” in which they stir as well as upon their intensity, which results in various degrees of extension into the adjoining regions.
