Psychoanalysis and Suggestion Blog

The problem of hypnosis is much clarified, when we realize that the mechanism determining it accounts not only for the pathology of suggestibility (hysteria), but also for many old and current methods of treatment and cure of neurotic states, namely, for the practical successes of primitive faith-healing, of Christian Science, and of psychoanalysis. These three ways of handling mental diseases, though thoroughly unlike in assumptions, are identical in so far as they dress their doctrine in an obscure or mystical terminology and, especially, in so far as they command, and rest upon, the same bodily powers. The scientific approach to our problems demands that the latter dependence be revealed and insists on explaining all phenomena as natural.