The writer is a young woman of twenty-four, whom I did not know personally. She wrote to me as follows: "I am a writer by profession and during the last year and a half have been connected with a leading magazine. In my work, I was constantly associated with one man, the managing editor. This man exerted a very peculiar influence over me. With everyone else connected with the magazine, I was my natural self and at ease, but the minute this man came into the room, I became an entirely different person, timid, nervous, and awkward, always placing myself and my work in a bad light. But under this man's influence, I did a great deal of literary work, my own and his too. I felt that he willed me to do it. The effect of this influence was that I suffered constantly from deep fits of depression almost amounting to melancholia. This lasted until last fall, when I felt that I should lose my mind if I stayed under his influence any longer. So I resigned my position and broke away. Then I felt like a person who, having a drug to stimulate him to do a certain amount of work, has that drug suddenly taken away, and without it I am unable to write at all...." I wrote to the young lady that she could cure herself without hypnotism and without my personal participation. I urged her simply to speak to herself early in the morning and especially in the evening before going to sleep, and to say to herself that the man had never helped her at her work, but that she did it entirely of her own power, and that he had never had any influence on it, and that she can write splendidly since she has left the place, and much better than before. A few months later, she came to Cambridge and thanked me for the complete success which the auto-suggestive treatment had secured. She was completely herself again and was fully successful in filling a literary position in which she had to write the editorials, the book reviews, the dramatic criticisms, and the social news. As a matter of course, such treatment had removed only the symptom. The over-suggestible constitution had not been and could not be changed. Thus it was not surprising that in the meantime, while her full literary strength had come back, she had developed some entirely different symptoms of bodily character which I had to remove by hypnotism. As soon as the obsessing idea of the influence of another person takes still a stronger hold and develops systems, the suspicion of insanity always lies near; especially when hallucinations are superadded, the probability is great that we then have to do with the delusions of a paranoiac, and thus no case for psychotherapeutic treatment. Yet it is always wise to keep a psychasthenic interpretation in view as long as the insanity is not evident. I may mention such an extreme case.