Hypnotic suggestion, which induces sleep, stills pain, silences fear, abolishes functional disturbances, works chiefly palliatively. The place for its application is where quick comprehension is desired. In its simplest form it resembles the treatment of a mother, who soothes her child with pacifying words and loving touch, and rocks him to sleep, and also it resembles the behavior of the father, who asserts his authority by force and breaks down the childish opposition. We find hypnotic suggestion, perfected and clothed in its scientific garment, in Liebeault's assertion: "It is a cure of authority, of faith, of confidence, a cure which frequently performs semi-miracles. Respect on one side, sympathy on the other, is what gives the hypnotiser results."
However highly we may value this last mentioned form of therapy, however numerous the cures due to it may be, however indispensable it may be in the practice of medicine, yet its splendor pales before the light which shines forth from the cures which aim at reeducation and which are directed toward the understanding. Those are the cures which make use of analysis.
One method, which we will call the superficial analytical method, is directed exclusively toward the upper consciousness and cures principally through exhorting, convincing, exercising and hardening. Its sponsors are Bernheim, Rosenbach, P. E. Levy, Dubois. At least it is true to its birth, it has suggestion blood in its veins.
The other method is the deeper: the Freudian analysis. This does not allow itself to be satisfied with seeing only one side of the medal, it does not limit its field of activity to the superliminal consciousness, in searching for the causes of psychogenic illnesses, but it penetrates into the strata which lie hidden under the threshold of the consciousness.
Where the moral and the suggestive methods of cure are limited exclusively to symptomatic treatment, the first form of educative therapy, limited merely to a superficial analysis, is only partly symptomatic, but the second form of educative therapy penetrates with its deep-going analysis to the root of the trouble, and has as its aim a fundamental cure.
Only too frequently the physician must be satisfied with the cure of the symptoms, with lightening the load. He always strives to remove the cause. Freud's great service is that he has opened before the physician a path which leads to the cause.
These lines of Vondel's seem as if composed for him:
"The physician must not only know How high the pulse has mounted, And where the sickness lies, which makes him groan with pain, But he must see the cause, from where The great weakness of this sickness came."
REVIEWS
AN ELEMENTARY STUDY OF THE BRAIN, BASED ON THE DISSECTION OF THE BRAIN OF THE SHEEP. By Eben W. Fiske, A.M., M.D. Illustrated with photographs and diagrams by the author. The Macmillan Company, New. York, 1913.