the hundred and one cathartic experiences of a phantastically puffed-up or entirely invented trauma was anything but the effect of suggestion. It is well enough if it helps. If one only had not a scientific conscience and that impulsion towards the truth! I found in many cases, especially when dealing with more mentally gifted patients, that I must recognise the therapeutic limitations of this method. It is, of course, a definite plan, and convenient for the doctor, since it makes no particular demands upon his intellect for new adaptations. The theory and practice are both of the pleasantest simplicity: "The neurosis is caused by a trauma. The trauma is abreacted." When the abreaction takes place under hypnotism, or with other magical accessories (dark room, peculiar lighting, and the rest), I remember once more the wise old woman, who opened my eyes not merely to the magic influence of the mesmeric gestures, but also to the essential character of hypnotism itself. But what alienated me once for all from this relatively efficacious indirect method of suggestion, based as it is upon an equally efficacious false theory, was the perception I obtained at the same time that, behind the confused deceptive intricacies of neurotic phantasies, there stands a conflict, which may be best described as a moral one. With this there began for me a new era of understanding. Research and therapy now coincided in the attempt to discover the causes and the rational solution of this conflict. That is what psychoanalysis meant to me. Whilst I had been getting this insight, Freud had built up his sexual theory of the neurosis, and therewith had brought forward an enormous number of questions for discussion, all of which I thought deserved the profoundest consideration. Thus I have had the good fortune of co-operating with Freud for a long time, and working with him in the investigation of the problem of sexuality in neurosis. You, perhaps, know from some of my earlier work that I was always dubious somewhat concerning the significance of sexuality.[1] This has now become the exact point where I am no longer altogether of Freud's opinion.
- ↑ See Author's preface to "The Psychology of Dementia Præcox."
