“Not in the least, if it is likely to do me any good.”
In another ten minutes the problem was solved. Doctor Donley from the outset had felt confident that the young man’s phobia must be connected in some way with a street-car accident, and so it proved. Fourteen years earlier, when walking along the street, he had seen a car strike and seriously injure a child who unexpectedly came from behind a wagon. He had noticed at the time that the car bore the number two hundred and thirteen, and he remembered thinking to himself: “There is always bad luck in thirteen.” The sight of the accident gave him a marked emotional shock, which, he said, upset him for several days.
All of this had long since passed from his waking memory, but was distinctly recalled during hypnosis. It was clear to Doctor Donley that the case was one of dissociation, and that the exciting cause of the young man’s unreasonable dread of odd-numbered cars was based on a painfully vivid subconscious memory image of the consciously forgotten tragedy. Also, it was evident that before the dread could be overcome the distressing memory image would have to be eradicated.
To accomplish this, Doctor Donley resorted to the method of substitution, suggesting to the patient, while still under hypnotic influence, that he was quite mistaken in supposing that the street-car had seriously injured the little girl; that, on the contrary, it had scarcely touched her.
The result, after only eight days’ treatment, was effectually to replace the painful memory image with one free from distressing associations. As by magic, the young man shook off his absurd phobia. No longer, when he had to take a car, did he stand on street corners, sometimes for an hour at a time, waiting anxiously for a car with an even number to appear.[40]
Bizarre as these cases must seem, they are actually typical of a widespread malady that causes an amount of suffering only appreciable by the sufferers themselves. In every land there are thousands of men and women afflicted with obsessions equally strange and equally distressing, yet amenable to treatment by the methods of psychopathology.
Often, in order to effect a cure, it is not necessary to make use of the roundabout device just described. Direct suggestion—a strongly negative command imposed in the hypnotic state—is frequently sufficient.
Often, besides, it is not necessary to use hypnotism at all, a cure resulting if only the psychopathologist can dig down to the root of the trouble, and, by recalling to conscious recollection the lost memory image, reassociate it with the rest of the contents of the upper consciousness.
Particularly interesting in this connection, as being illustrative also of an ingenious method of “mind tunnelling” nowadays frequently employed to get at forgotten memories, is a case reported by Doctor A. A. Brill, a New York psychopathologist. His patient was a young woman who applied to be treated for extreme nervousness. She had been perfectly well until three months before, when, she said, she had begun to suffer from a complication of disorders, including insomnia, loss of appetite, constant headache, irritability, and stomach trouble. No physical cause for her condition could be detected, and Doctor Brill suspected that it was due to some secret anxiety, but the patient earnestly assured him that she “had nothing on her mind.”