In view of the discussions in the preceding section concerning the difficulty of my technique, which I have unreservedly exposed,—I have really collected them from my most difficult cases, though it will often be easier work—in view then of this state of affairs everybody will wish to ask whether it would not be more suitable, instead of all these tortures, to apply oneself more energetically to hypnosis, or to limit the application of the cathartic method to only such cases as can be placed in deep hypnosis. To the latter proposition I should have to answer that the number of patients available for my skill would shrink considerably; but to the former advice I will advance the supposition that even where hypnosis could be produced the resistance would not be very much lessened. My experiences in this respect are not particularly extensive, so that I am unable to go beyond this supposition, but wherever I achieved a cathartic cure in the hypnotic state I found that the work devolved upon me was not less than in the state of concentration. I have only recently finished such a treatment during which course I caused the disappearance of a hysterical paralysis of the legs. The patient merged into a state, psychically very different from the conscious, and somatically distinguished by the fact that she was unable to open her eyes or rise without my ordering her to do so; and still I never had a case showing greater resistance than this one. I placed no value on these physical signs, and toward the end of the ten months’ treatment they really became imperceptible. The condition of the patient during our work has therefore lost nothing of its psychic peculiarities, such as the ability to recall the unconscious and its very peculiar relation to the person of the physician. To be sure, in the history of Mrs. Emmy v. N. I have described an example of a cathartic cure accomplished in a profound somnambulism in which the resistance played almost no part. But nothing that I obtained from this woman would have required any special effort; I obtained nothing that she could not have told me in her waking state after a longer acquaintanceship and some esteem. The real causes of her disease, which were surely identical with the causes of her relapses after my treatment, I have never found—it was my first attempt in this therapy—and when I once asked her accidentally for a reminiscence which contained a fragment of the erotic, I found her just as resistant and unreliable in her statements as any one of my later non-somnambulic patients. This patient’s resistance, even in the somnambulic state, against other requirements and exactions I have already discussed in her history. Since I have witnessed cases who, even in deep somnambulism were absolutely refractory therapeutically despite their obedience in everything else, I really became skeptical as to the value of hypnosis for the facilitation of the cathartic treatment. A case of this kind I