“You will no longer think of this,” he kept assuring her. “You will forget it, absolutely, permanently.”
Day after day, for weeks, he hypnotized her, and reiterated similar commands. But she continued to be afflicted with her irrational fear, and it finally became certain that her subconscious recollection of the phobia-causing scene of twenty-five years before was too deeply rooted to be destroyed by direct attack. Instead, however, of abandoning the task as hopeless, Doctor Janet, with a shrewdness born of long experience, made a clever change in tactics.
“You insist,” he said to the hypnotized Justine, “that you cannot help seeing in your mind’s eye the corpse of the man who died. Very well, I have no objection to that. But hereafter you must see it decently clothed. So when it next appears to you, you will see it wearing a bright blue-and-green uniform, the uniform of a foreign military officer.”
Happily, this suggestion “took,” and Doctor Janet followed up his advantage by suggesting that the subconscious memory image which she regarded as that of a corpse was, in reality, the image of a living man. This suggestion likewise being successful, he set about getting rid of the idea “cholera,” and its dire implications. Hypnotizing the patient as usual, he demanded:
“What is this ‘cholera’ that troubles you so much? Do you not understand that it is only the name of the fine gentleman in blue and green, whom you see marching up and down? He is a Chinese general, and his name is Cho Le Ra. Bear that well in mind.”
Quite evidently there was nothing to inspire dread in the image of a picturesque Chinese officer, General Cho Le Ra. Little by little, as this artificial conception obtained firmer lodgment in Justine’s subconsciousness, the baneful idea which it was intended to supplant faded away, and with its fading the abnormal fear diminished, until at length it entirely disappeared, greatly to her joy and the warm gratitude of her devoted husband.[39]
Other psychopathologists, following Doctor Janet’s lead, have similarly used this method of substituting one subconscious idea for another. Doctor John E. Donley, a well-known neurologist of Providence, Rhode Island, and one of the few psychopathologists whom the United States has yet produced, was once consulted by a young man of thirty-two, who said to him:
“Doctor Donley, I hear you have been very successful in handling people troubled with foolish notions. I’m bothered with as foolish a notion as any one could possibly imagine. I simply can’t bear to ride in a street-car with an odd number. Even-numbered cars give me no trouble at all, but if an odd-numbered car comes along, I’ve got to let it pass, no matter how great my hurry. My friends laugh at me, but I tell you it’s no laughing matter. The thing has got on my nerves so that it is unbearable.”
“How long have you been suffering in this way?” asked Doctor Donley.