of the views of this investigator and his initiates.” (Frank, “Affektstörungen Einleitung.”)
One can easily disregard this little quip, but one must take more seriously one’s self-criticism. We may have to ask ourselves whether, since science is an undivided, ever-flowing stream, we are justified in relinquishing on conscientious grounds, any method or combination of methods by means of which we know cures can be achieved?
Looking more closely at the fundamental grounds of your aversion to the use of hypnosis (or semi-hypnosis, the degree matters nothing) in treatment by suggestion, (which as a matter of fact every doctor and every therapeutic method makes use of willy-nilly, no matter what it is called); it is clear that what has disgusted you in hypnotism is at bottom nothing but the so-called “transference” to the doctor, which you, with your unalloyed psychoanalytic treatment, can get rid of as little as any one else, for indeed it plays a chief part in the success of the treatment. Your insistence that the psychoanalyst must be answerable for the cleanness of his own hands—(here I agree with you unreservedly)—is an inevitable conclusion. But, after all, does anything more “augurish” really cling to the use made of hypnosis in psychotherapeutic treatment, than to the quite inevitable use made of the “transference to the doctor” for therapeutic ends? In either case we must perforce “take shares” in faith as a healing agent. As for the feeling which the patient—whether man or woman—entertains for the doctor, is there never anything in the background save conscious or unconscious sexual desire? In many cases your view is most certainly correct; more than one woman has been frank enough to confess that the beginning of hypnosis was accompanied by voluptuous pleasure. But this is not true in all instances—or how would you explain the underlying feeling in the hypnotising of one animal by another, e.g. snake and bird. Surely you can say that there the feeling of fear reigns, fear which is an inversion of the libido, such as comes upon the bride in that hypnoidal state before she yields to her husband wherein pure sexual
