Descartes as a psychotherapist. The uses of rational philosophy in the treatment of discomfort and disease; its limitations.

DEscARTS' psychotherapeutical designs can be derived from his correspondence with the Bohemian Princess Elizabeth and from his Treatise ofthe Passions, published in 1649, at the age of 53, a few months prior to his death. These psychotherapeutical designs are closely related to his theory of the passions. Descartes conceived the passions as being caused, upheld and fortified by some movement ofthe (animal) spirits, which he believed to be the 'most active and quickest particles ofthe blood' converted into a very subtle air or wind. He defined the passions as cognisings, or feelings, or emotions; in fact, his aim was 'to consider how the passions of the soul differ from all its other thought.'" He thus stressed and always maintained the primarily psychical nature of the passions, regardless of their physical equipment. Not only did he add 'that they quite specially refer to the soul, in order to distinguish them from the other feelings which are not so referred-some, such as odours, sounds, colours, referred to external objects, other, such as hunger, thirst, pain, referring to our body' ;2 he explicitly stated that feelings exist only in my thought ('sentiments ... .n'ont aucune existence hors de mapensie') and that they are as different from the objects as pain is from the shape or the movement of the arrow which causes it.3 Moreover, since he believed animals to be deprived of reason and thought, and since, on the other hand, he could not deny to them the movements of the spirits and the gland, he ascribed to animals no more than the movements of the nerves and the muscles which, as a rule, accompany the passions. However he denied to animals the passions themselves, ascribing them solely and unmistakably to beings endowed with reason and thought.4 The first therapeutical design is embodied in two letters addressed to the Princess Elizabeth. In his letter of May or June 1645, Descartes confessed that there is only one remedy which consists in diverting our imagination and our senses as much as possible and in using only our understanding in considering the enemies, who are within us and with whom we must live, the 'enemies' evidently being the state of suffering and the symptoms which the princess must have described in her own letter. He drew the picture of