Superficial analysis can bring us a long way toward the goal. In many cases
it may suffice. But the profound, the Freudian analysis, is what we need if
we wish to attain the radical cure of psychoneurosis, as far as we can ever
speak of a radical cure. Many cases of illness do not lend themselves to
deep analysis.
When, because of the nature of the illness, or the lifetime, or the feeble
intelligence of the patient, or because of temporary circumstances of a
moral or material nature, its adaptation is excluded or impossible, it is
advisable, especially in chronic cases-- to take refuge in the more
palliative forms of the psychic methods of cure.
Thus the psychotherapeutic as moral leader fills the role of guide
(directeur-d'ames), one who helps along the doubter, encourages the toilers,
calms the frightened, arouses courage, keeps up hope and comforts where
comfort is needed.
Pierre Janet, in his instructive book ("Obsessions et Idees Fixes"),
observes that one of his chronic patients gave him the pet name of "le
remonteur de pendules," an expression which luminously describes the role of
the physician of souls, who, tirelessly, day in, day out, lifts the burdens,
and for a time breathes new life into the depressed.
Hypnotic suggestion, which induces sleep, stills pain, silences fear,
abolishes functional disturbances, works chiefly palliatively. The place for
its application is where quick comprehension is desired. In its simplest
form it resembles the treatment of a mother, who soothes her child with
pacifying words and loving touch, and rocks him to sleep, and also it
resembles the behavior of the father, who asserts his authority by force and
breaks down the childish opposition. We find hypnotic suggestion, perfected
and clothed in its scientific garment, in Liebeault's assertion: "It is a
cure of authority, of faith, of confidence, a cure which frequently performs
semi-miracles. Respect on one side, sympathy on the other, is what gives the
hypnotiser results."
However highly we may value this last mentioned form of therapy, however
numerous the cures due to it may be, however indispensable it may be in the
practice of medicine, yet its splendor pales before the light which shines
forth from the cures which aim at reeducation and which are directed toward
the understanding. Those are the cures which make use of analysis.
One method, which we will call the superficial analytical method, is
directed exclusively toward the upper consciousness and cures principally
through exhorting, convincing, exercising and hardening. Its sponsors are
Bernheim, Rosenbach, P. E. Levy, Dubois. At least it is true to its birth,
it has suggestion blood in its veins.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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