Apart from other things, one factor may be mentioned which is very antagonistic to suggestion, and that is _fear_, possibly fear which is for the most part unconscious. Thus, supposing that the alcoholic gives himself the suggestion that he shall pass a public-house without going into it, and he has a definite fear of the wish to go in; he will probably find that in suggesting that he shall not have the wish, he is actually re-enforcing the strength of the wish which is there. His unconscious counter-will is at work, and turning the force of the suggestion in the wrong direction, and he will very likely succumb to temptation more readily than before. Hence, in a subject where we have acute fear of failure, suggestion must be very carefully dealt with. Moreover, suggestion, to be efficient, must have other things in its favour, some knowledge, in fact, of the underlying causes of the deleterious action which we wish to eradicate. It is not impossible to improve oneself by suggestion, even though one may be ignorant of the cause of one’s trouble, but I have found that it is infinitely more easy to obtain this improvement if one has previously brought into consciousness the underlying cause, and can therefore direct one’s suggestion to this rather than merely to the effect or symptom. I have myself devised a method for the use of certain of my patients by means of which suggestion may be directed to both the cause and result, as indicated shortly. Ordinary methods of suggestion are frequently merely directed to the cure of the symptom rather than the disease; in fact, such auto-suggestion, popular as it has become, may frequently be likened to a doctor who treats small-pox by putting ointment on the spots, or appendicitis by giving morphia. It will be successful in those cases where the manifestations of the disease are worse than the disease itself; but when the causes are strong and virile, suggestion directed towards the symptom will not avail. In an earlier chapter, we described how the individual suffering from deleterious abnormalities of temperament could, to some extent, trace the cause of this back to infancy. We told how this, in itself, would, if repeatedly brought to mind on succeeding occasions, produce considerable improvement. We have further discussed how he could consciously turn the energy from one form of reaction into another and more suitable form. All these methods, however, may be made considerably more efficient by the active use of auto-suggestion, as I have indicated, directed partially to the cause and partially to the result desired. Thus, the form which suggestion should take in the case of the man, whom we quoted in the last chapter as being over-impatient in the restaurant, would be somewhat as follows: