PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE COMMUNITY Both the physician and the patient find their place in the community the life interests of which are superior to the interests of the individual. It is an unavoidable question how far from the higher point of view of the social mind the psychotherapeutic efforts should be encouraged or suppressed. Are there any conditions which suggest suspicion of or direct opposition to such curative work? Of course society has to be sure that no possible misuse and damage are to result from such practice. Fears in that direction have been uttered repeatedly, but from very different standpoints. One which is perhaps most often heard in popular circles results from an entire misunderstanding and deserves hardly any discussion after our detailed study of the processes involved. It is claimed that suggestive power, especially in the form of hypnotization, may be secretly misused to make anyone without his knowledge and against his will a passive instrument of the hypnotist's intent. Often this is coupled with telepathic fancies. The hypnotist is believed to have mystic power to bring any person in a distant region under his mental control and thus to be able to carry out any sinister plans by the help of his innocent victim. All hypnotizing therefore ought to be interdicted by the state. The presuppositions of such a view are, as we know now, entirely absurd. We know that hypnotism is not based on any special power of the hypnotizer; there is no magnetic fluid in the sense of the old mesmerism. The imagination of the hypnotized person is the only hypnotizing agency. Thus no one can be hypnotized without his knowledge or against his will. The story of telepathic mysteries which is often brought before the public is probably always the outcome of a diseased brain. It is indeed a frequent symptom in paranoia and other insanities that the patient who feels abnormal organic sensations and abnormal unaccountable impulses interprets them as influences of a distant enemy. Whole pamphlets have been written with elaboration of such insane misinterpretations and requests to legislatures have been made in that spirit, but the physician recognizes easily throughout the whole argumentation the well-known phenomena of the mental disease.