On Psychiatry

Today, at best, when we speak of the soul, we have an idea of a sum of abstractions or of abstract feelings themselves and the like. This sum of abstractions, of course, cannot set an organism in motion, cannot somehow build a bridge to the organism. Therefore, one cannot speak of being able to influence the external physical, real organism in some way by acting on the soul life, which is only a sum of abstractions. On the other hand, there is what has been gained through science about the physical organism; for it has been invented that soul phenomena are only parallel phenomena or even effects of the physical organism. The concrete ideas that are formed about the physical organism are not such as to allow anything to be pressed out of them about the psychic.