"On the other hand, we can save lives by using the technique we have now. We don't dare _not_ use it. "When they chopped off those hands, centuries ago, the stumps were cauterized by putting them in boiling oil. It looked like another injury piled on top of the first, but the chirurgeons, not knowing _why_ it worked, still knew that a lot more ex-pickpockets lived through their ordeal if the boiling oil was used afterward. "And that's what we're doing with this technique right here and now. We're using it because it saves lives, lives that may potentially or actually be a great deal more valuable than the warped personality that might have taken such a life. "But the one thing that I am working for right now and will continue to work for is a _real_ cure, if that's possible. A real, genuine, usable kind of psychotherapy; one which is at least on a par with the science of cake-baking when it comes to the percentages of successes and failures." * * * * * His Grace thought that over for a minute. Then he leaned back and looked at me through narrowed eyes. There was a half smile on his lips "Royall, old man, let's admit one thing, just between ourselves," His voice became very slow and very deliberate. "Both you and I know that this process, whatever it is, is _not_ psychotherapy." "Why do you say that?" I wasn't trying to deny anything; I just wanted to know the reasoning behind his conclusions. "Because I know what psychotherapy can and can't do. And I know that psychotherapy can _not_ do the sort of thing we've been discussing. "It's as if you'd taken me out on a rifle range, to a target two thousand yards from the shooter and let me watch that marksman put fifty shots out of fifty into a six-inch bull's-eye. I might not know what the shooter is using, but I would know beyond any shadow of doubt that it was _not_ an ordinary revolver. More, I would know that it could not be any possible improvement upon the revolver. It simply would have to be an instrument of an entirely different order. "If, in 1945, any intelligent military man had been told that the Japanese city of Hiroshima had been totally destroyed by a bomber dropping a single bomb, he would be certain that the bomb was a new and different kind from any ever known before. He would know that, mind you, without necessarily knowing a great deal about chemistry. "I don't need to know a devil of a lot about psychotherapy to know that the process you've been describing is as far beyond the limits of psychotherapy as the Hiroshima bomb was beyond the limits of chemistry. Ditto for hypnosis and/or Pavlov's 'conditioned reflex', by the way. "Now, just to clear the air, what _is_ it?"