With regard to your question as to the applicability of the cathartic method, the following is my standpoint: every method is good if it serves its purpose, including every method of suggestion, even Christian Science, Mental Healing, etc. "_A truth is a truth, when it works._" It is quite another question whether a scientific physician can answer for it to his conscience should he sell little bottles of Lourdes-water because that suggestion is at times very useful. Even the so-called highly scientific suggestion-therapy employs the wares of the medicine-man and the exorcising Schaman. And please, why should it not? The public is not even now much more advanced and continues to expect miracles from the doctor. And truly those doctors should be deemed clever--worldly-wise in every respect--who understand the art of investing themselves with the halo of the medicine-man. Not only have they the biggest practices--they have also the best results. This is simply because countless physical maladies (leaving out of count the neuroses) are complicated and burdened with psychic elements to an extent scarcely yet suspected. The medical exorcist's whole behaviour betrays his full valuation of the psychic element when he gives the patient the opportunity of fixing his faith firmly upon the doctor's mysterious personality. Thus does he win the sick man's mind, which henceforth helps him indeed to restore his body also to health. The cure works best when the doctor really believes in his own formulæ, otherwise he may be overcome by scientific doubt and so lose the correct, convincing tone. I, too, for a time practised hypnotic suggestion enthusiastically. But there befell me three dubious incidents which I want you to note:-- 1. Once there came to me to be hypnotised for various neurotic troubles a withered peasant-woman of some fifty years old. She was not easy to hypnotise, was very restless, kept opening her eyes--but at last I did succeed. When I waked her after about half an hour she seized my hand and with many words testified to her overflowing gratitude. I said: "But you are by no means cured yet, so keep your thanks till the end of the treatment." She: "I am not thanking you for that, but--(blushing and whispering)--because you have been so _decent_." So she said, looked at me with a sort of tender admiration and departed. I gazed long at the spot where she had stood--and asked myself, confounded, "So decent?"--good heavens! surely she hadn't imagined, somehow or other.... This glimpse made me suspect for the first time that possibly the loose-minded person, by means of that notorious feminine (I should at that time have said "animal") directness of instinct, understood more about the essence of hypnotism than I with all my knowledge of the scientific profundity of the text-books. Therein lay my harmlessness.