The weakening of the personality complexes of the soldier, as just described, his subjection to other ideas with accentuated feelings which are held down in the subconscious and thus connected with the constant readiness to subordination under the strivings of ego-hostile feelings, represents the so-called morbid suggestibility. To make use of this suggestibility for curative purposes without exposing its foundations is to increase the illness instead of bringing about a cure. The neurotic, in my opinion, succumbs in the first instance to auto-suggestion, that is to say, to over-strong emotionally toned ideas which have arisen in him at a time when the ego-complex is weakened in power or completely suspended. According to my observations, narrowings and suppressions of consciousness represent the initial stages of the war neuroses. In the smallest loss of consciousness, the shock effects of terror, up to the severe fainting attacks and the long continued loss of consciousness after being buried, we see the self-conscious of the personality more or less obliterated and the way opened to the unconscious. Here undoubtedly at the commencement are operating those teleological mechanisms which constitute the foundation of the neuroses and their formation of symptoms. Consciousness refuses to take up ideas or to assimilate at the moment those things which are too horrible in their reality to be consciously tolerated. Therefore those psychic shocks, those fainting attacks and profound loss of consciousness denote, provided there is no injury _in cerebro_, a power of the unconscious that attracts to itself the entire psychosis in a salutary manner. Hypnosis gives us a clear picture of these processes. It shows us the patient in the same state of consciousness as that in which during the war he had acquired the origin of the illness. During hypnosis the soldier relates, or once again lives through, all the things that he had experienced in former circumstances only unconsciously. We learn of distressing pains of which, when he was buried, he never became conscious. In such a hypnosis we see his anxiety displayed, his anger arise, feelings which at the moment of the excitation were benumbed and like lightning were dragged violently into the unconscious.