The lady came from the South, with her nurse, to Boston and
insisted on being hypnotized by me. I cannot say whether a really
deep hypnotic state was produced at once as I refrained from
testing it. There was certainly no amnesia. Probably it began only
with a slight drowsiness but at the fifth treatment I found a
relatively deep hypnosis. It was a capricious case in which the
improvement was fluctuating but clearly setting in from the first
day. I trained her in hearing and seeing words like death and
suicide with a reenforced feeling of strength and calmness; I
forced her to see and touch scissors with an artificial attitude of
strength and indifference. At the same time I reenforced her good
mood and her enjoyment in life. When she left for England a few
weeks later, she felt herself mentally cured, and throughout the
summer her letters testified the wonderful change which the
treatment had brought about. Half a year later, as the result of
an exhausting physical local treatment, the psychophysiological
symptoms came back to a certain degree. She requested me by a
letter from England to give her some help by suggestion to suppress
again the recurring intrusions. As I had observed her strong
suggestibility, I sent her over the ocean a little pencil of
mother-of-pearl which she had seen in my hand, and advised her to
look at it until she counted twenty slowly and then to close her
eyes and simply to sleep. The autosuggestive effect was unusually
strong. She writes from London: "When I saw the enclosure of your
letter I felt as if it would burn through my hand and the feeling
became so overpowering that I locked it away with my jewels, but as
the days ran into a week I felt I could not live with it in my
apartment any more, and I felt almost ill, until it occurred to me
I could seal it and take it to my bankers. I felt as dreamy and
absent-minded and paralyzed as if you had just treated me."
Nevertheless the effect was on the whole the desired one and she
returned to America with a wholesome freedom of mind. I hypnotized
her twice again and she writes in her last letter: "I can never
repay you for what you have done for me. You have given me back my
courage and my love of life in its vividness and interest and
color, all that through the last years I had so entirely lost."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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