I have preferred to answer your questions in rather nonsequent fashion. Whatever is still unanswered, let me now repeat: light hypnosis and complete hypnosis are but varying grades of intensity of unconscious attraction towards the hypnotist. Who can here venture to draw sharp distinctions? To a critical intelligence it is unthinkable that suggestibility and suggestion can be excluded in the cathartic method. They are present everywhere and are universal human attributes, even with Dubois and the psychoanalysts who think they work on purely rational lines. No technique, no self-deception avails here—the doctor works nolens volens—and perhaps primarily—by means of his personality, that is by suggestion. In the cathartic treatment, what is of far more importance to the patient than the conjuring up of old phantasies, is the being so often with the doctor, and confidence and belief in him personally, and in his method. The belief, the self-confidence, perhaps also the devotion with which the doctor does his work, are far more important things to the patient (imponderabilia though they be) than the recalling of old traumata.[1]
Ultimately we shall some day know from the history of medicine everything that has ever been of service; then perhaps at last we may come to the really desirable therapy, to psychotherapy. Did not even the old materia medica of filth have brilliant cures?—cures which only faded away with the belief in it!
Because I recognise that the patient does attempt to lay hold of the doctor's personality, in spite of all possible rational safeguards, I have formulated the demand that the psychotherapeutist shall be held just as responsible for the cleanness of his own hands as is the surgeon. I hold it to be an absolutely indispensable preliminary that the psychoanalyst should himself first undergo an analysis, for his personality is one of the chief factors in the cure.
- ↑ Thus a patient, who had been treated by a young colleague without very much result, once said to me: "Certainly I made great progress with him, and I am much better than I was. He tried to analyse my dreams. It's true he never understood them, but he took so much trouble over them. He is really a good doctor."
