and by reason of his own determination, rather than to procure his doctor some sort of advantage; though of course it would he absurd from the therapeutic standpoint not to allow the patient to get better because in doing so he does the doctor a good turn also. It suffices if the patient knows it. But we must not prescribe for him which path he should take to recovery. Naturally it seems to me (from the psychoanalytic standpoint) an inadmissible use of suggestive influence if the patient is compelled to get better out of love for the doctor. And indeed such compulsion may sometimes take bitter revenge. The "you must and shall be saved" is no more to be commended in nerve-therapy than in any other department of life. It contradicts the principle of analytic treatment, which shuns all coercion and desires to let everything grow up from within. I do not, as you know, object to influencing by use of suggestion in general, but merely to a doubtful motivation. If the doctor demands that his patient shall get well from love of himself, the patient may easily reckon on reciprocal services and will without doubt try to extort them. I can but utter a warning against any such method. A far stronger motive for recovery—also a far healthier and ethically more valuable one—consists in the patient's thorough insight into the real state of affairs, the recognition of how things are now and how they ought to be. The man of any sort of worth will then discern that he can hardly sit down at ease in the quagmire of his neurosis.
With your rendering of what I said about the healing power of personality I cannot entirely agree. I wrote that the doctor's personality has a power for healing because the patient reads the doctor's personality: not that he produces a cure through love of the doctor. The doctor cannot prevent the patient's beginning to behave himself towards his conflicts just as the doctor himself behaves, for nothing is finer than a neurotic's intuition. But every strong transference serves this same purpose. If the doctor makes himself charming he buys off from the patient a series of resistances which he should have overcome, and whose overcoming will certainly have to be gone through later on. Nothing is won
