A distinction must be made between stereotyped prayer (such as the Lord’s Prayer) and personal prayer rehearsing one’s worries and asking for help. The latter kind is not unlikely to revive all the day’s problems and to set the would-be-sleeper solving them over again at the very time when he should forget them.
The repetition of some passage which was memorized in childhood and which, from long familiarity has become perfectly impersonal, may go a long way toward creating the monotony, and hence the feeling of safety, without which there cannot be any sleep.
After following all the rules I have laid down a number of people will still be unable to sleep. When the physico-psychic causes have been removed without improving the condition of the subject, the psychico-physical factors should then receive attention.
As I said before, normal people can sleep under almost any conditions because their vagotonic activities function regularly, while neurotics cannot sleep well even under ideal conditions because their sympathicotonic activities are constantly raising a signal danger and imagining emergencies amidst the safest surroundings, mental and physical.
The insomnia sufferer is suffering from some fear. That fear has to be determined and uprooted by psychoanalysis.
Some people cannot sleep because they have gone through a period of sleeplessness and expect it to endure for ever. The men of the Emmanuel movement often had the following experience: a subject would explain that he could not sleep under any circumstances. The Emmanuel healer would ask him to sit in a chair in which, he said, many people had fallen asleep, and after a few minutes of soothing conversation or concentration, the insomniac would doze off peacefully. In certain cases, such a cure may be permanent; in other cases, when the results are obtained through transference and suggestion, the help of the psychological adviser or hypnotist may be too frequently required.
Other subjects are prevented from sleeping by “worry.” Telling a careworn insomniac not to worry is as silly and useless as telling a lovelorn person to stop being in love.
Discussing a patient’s worries with him, however, often accomplishes much good, for it compels him to sift all his evidence, which may be convincing to him but to no one else. The worried person who is beginning to experience doubts as to the magnitude of his trouble, is like the patient suffering from delusions who has lost faith in his delusions.
The parasitic fears and cravings which attach themselves to some small worry and, at times, magnify it out of proportion, may in such a way be disintegrated and dissociated from the actual, justified fear.
Giving the patient “good reasons” why he should not worry, is again a sort of suggestion of the most futile and least durable type.