"I have always, as long as I can remember, been very nervous and sensitive. When about seven years of age, I was attacked by St. Vitus' Dance. Before that I cannot say whether I was particularly nervous or not. Afterward it was impressed upon me by the remarks of relatives that I was nervous, so that I soon took note of this condition myself. The manner in which this weakness has been especially troublesome is that it has caused me to be very shy. I shrank from new acquaintances and disliked being observed. Often in walking along on the street, I imagined myself closely noticed by the passerby and I always felt uncomfortable.

"About three years ago I suffered from typhoid fever and after recovering, a new form of the old trouble showed itself. This time I imagined that when eating I chewed my food in a manner that was ridiculous and which made people hardly keep from laughter in observing me. Often I had to leave the table when half through because I felt I could not bear having critical eyes upon me any longer. About three months ago I determined to be troubled no further by my own foolish fancies and by constantly schooling myself I have improved very much. Still, however, when I walk alone along the street, I must fortify myself mentally before passing each group of people. If once I allow myself to think that they are looking at me, I feel almost paralyzed, my feet seem too heavy to lift, my arms do not seem to swing naturally, and in attempting to look placid and unconcerned, I feel that I am failing utterly. Also when at table, I must still tell myself before each mouthful that I have no need for fear, that my manner at table is equal and perhaps superior to the others beside me. I have gone a certain length in my self-training, and have relieved myself of a great deal of the mental distress, but now I believe I can advance no further. What seems needful now is to do away with the self-consciousness which brought on my worries, though whether this is possible is hard to say."

"For years I have been seeking, or perhaps to be more accurate I should say waiting, for a mind to drift toward me; a mind that would understand my particular case of fear brought on by the constant bullying and nagging from my earliest childhood by those in my home. This fear of brutality has greatly depleted my nervous system and has unfitted me for the strong, useful, forceful life I should have expressed. If I could only rid my mind of the thought that I am always displeasing, or rather, going to displease people, for I hardly do displease them; if I could get rid of the fear of caring what the attitude of other minds toward me is, I feel that I should then strike out into a strong life of helpfulness to others. In other words I have always felt behind me a great force pressing me out into public work. When I was a child, it was so strong that I was sat down upon brutally, to so great an extent that I feared to voice my convictions and that fear still clings to me like a nemesis. It seems that every individual personality in a public or private audience rises up to overwhelm me, causing my tongue to grow heavy and my mind to become a blank. This enervating fear blends into every thought I have, whether sleeping or waking. I have fought with all my might to rid myself of it but so far in vain."

"I am possessed of a fear that is constantly with me that something dreadful is going to happen and I do not seem to be able to overcome it. I am told by physicians that I am bodily sound, although very nervous, and that the fear is generated entirely by autosuggestion. When at its worst, it weakens and terrorizes me and in my better moments I am tormented with a fear of a recurrence of a bad spell. It is fear of a fear. A year ago at this time I had a very bad spell but got along fairly well through the summer, but I am afraid that I will soon again be in a bad condition and lose all that I may have gained."

"I am teaching in a high school. I am of a nervous temperament and constitutionally limited in endurance. Often my work is done in a condition of greater or less exhaustion. I find that I blush very easily in purely freakish ways, when there is no occasion for it. I find this blushing connecting itself with certain of the girl pupils of my classes in a conspicuous way. It occurs hardly ever except when my class is facing me and I seem to be powerless to overcome it. I have always tried to live a careful moral life, but my early life was very much secluded. I lacked entirely the free intercourse young people usually have together and I felt awkward with others for a long time. In the matter of the blushing, it sometimes occurs in the case of girls who are especially pleasing to me but also not infrequently in the case of some who are not at all so. The whole thing might be passed over were it not that it has considerable effect in causing constraint toward my students and in some cases affecting them very strongly in an emotional way at the very time of life when such things can do most harm. I regard the matter as being so serious that it brings directly in question my right to teach, but I do not feel at all sure I could find other work that I could do if I give up my present position. The very thought that on a particular occasion it would be extremely awkward to blush makes it almost impossible for me to avoid it."

The patient is a young university professor. His intellectual work is perfect in all directions. There are no nervous symptoms, though there are some slight disturbances of digestion. He suffers as soon as he comes into a crowd of people and as soon as he is on any high place, where he has to look down; the worst when both conditions are combined, as for instance, at a concert or a theatre in a balcony seat. But every meeting of many persons, even at church, produces all the symptoms of nervous excitement. He was easily brought into hypnotic state by verbal suggestions. When he was in hypnosis, I reënforced the conditions for an opposite attitude. I told him that as soon as he was in a crowd of persons he would feel especially comfortable, would enjoy himself, would fully enter into the spirit of the occasion and feel especially secure in their presence. Whenever he should be on a high place, he would enjoy the safety of the ground on which he was standing or the seat on which he was sitting. I assured him that he would neglect entirely whatever he saw and would rely completely on his safe feeling resulting from his tactual impressions. After having hypnotized him three times the disturbance disappeared completely, and even an evening at the theatre in an exposed box on the balcony was enjoyed without any discomfort. After about a year, at a period of fatiguing work, some traces of the anxiety appeared again. This time two hypnotic sittings were sufficient to remove the disturbance of the equilibrium, which as far as I know has not come back. The same hypnotic treatments were used in a secondary way to remove the digestive trouble.

The young lady wrote me: "I come of a race of strong women and am not hysterical or easily frightened by many things that disturb women. Since my fifteenth year I have been seized by hallucinations of absurd or serious nature which no reasoning could explain away and which have gradually undermined my power of resistance to them. At the age of twenty-two, after a year of unusually hard work, my nervous endurance gave way, and with this breakdown came a sense of fear and a horror of crime that I have been unable to overcome. I have never felt the slightest inclination toward wrongdoing. It is a feeling rather that my shrinking from any mention of evil makes it impossible for me to listen or think rationally when such things are discussed. This feeling has seemed to change my whole attitude toward life and has left me without power to control my facial expression or carriage when it takes possession of me. I have been able to teach more successfully than I could hope, but it is only by cutting myself off from the friendships and pleasures incident to my life that I am able to accomplish my work. I have fought this trouble alone and will still do so if there is no help, but the thought that it is the source of great distress to those dear to me makes it very hard."

A few weeks later the lady insisted on coming to Cambridge. I found that there had never been any hallucinations and that she used the word in her letter only to indicate some insistent memory images which had never taken the vividness of real impressions. In the presence of her friend, I hypnotized her deeply and strengthened through urgent suggestions her consciousness of her having done the morally right thing at every situation in her life and her conviction that she never did and never would commit a crime. Here as always, if possible, I left alone the emotional idea but reënforced the opposite. The effect was an immediate one. She felt freer the next day than she had felt for years. I repeated the treatment a few times and she assured me that the feeling had disappeared entirely.

The highly educated and refined lady had lost her husband by an accident in Switzerland, which had been misrepresented by some of the newspapers as suicide. Two years later she wrote to me: "I feel as if I had received indelible photographs on my brain which have since greatly affected my health and from which I may never recover. This winter the symptoms I have been able to control returned and I have been ill. I unfortunately saw the newspaper headlines with my husband's supposed suicide. Though I exclaimed then, 'how outrageous,' I felt as if I had been struck and since then I can seldom read a paper without dread and apprehension, and the hearing of anyone's suicide fills me with terror. When I hurried to Europe, on the ocean a week from the day of my husband's death, I had a curious and overwhelming shock. On opening a drawer and seeing a pair of scissors, they looked to me like a dagger and suddenly the whole cabin seemed filled with implements of death. The doctors said that I would find it hard to get over such impressions but I told them I would, as I had courage and will. But I have been realizing in these two years that I may be suffering from something that may be beyond the control of will. I often become so nervously sensitive that scissors are unbearable for me to see, or a steel knife or anything that might express death. Our family physicians are still against hypnotism, and if I should go to a neurologist of my own selection, it might be to one who believed still only in nerve foods, baths, or a sanitarium."

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 reënforced 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 reënforced 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."

A young woman afflicted with epilepsy was brought up in the belief that she had only from time to time fainting attacks from overwork, and with them secondarily neurasthenic symptoms, especially spells of depression colored by a constant fear of the next fainting. She had heard voices all her life and they frightened her in an intolerable way. I produced a very slight hypnotic state. I concentrated my effort entirely on suggestions which were to give her new interest in life, and diminished the emotional character of the voices without even trying to make them disappear. I proceeded for several months. The young woman herself believed that the fainting attacks came less frequently afterwards; yet I am inclined to think that that is an illusion. But there was no doubt that her whole personality became almost a different one with the new share in the world. The epilepsy remained probably unchanged but all the superadded emotions were annihilated and she felt an entirely new courage which allowed her to control herself between her regular attacks. She had been unable to undertake any regular work before for a long while, but all that improved. More than a year afterward, she wrote me: "I have really worked most of the time this past winter and spring and I think I can see a steady though slow gain. I am reading quite a little and doing it for the most part easily. To be sure I have, after I have read, hard times with the voices but their character is usually less determined and fearful than formerly. Several times I have thought I must come again to you but each time I have started again to fight it out for myself, but now, as I am gaining, I can better estimate the great help your influence was to me at a juncture when everything seemed so hopeless and helpless."

An elderly woman has been troubled her life long by a disproportionate fear of thunderstorms with almost hysterical symptoms. As she had no other complaint, I hardly found it worth while to enter into a systematic treatment and could not expect much of a change from a short treatment, considering that her hysteric response had lasted through half a century. As she begged for some treatment, I brought her into a drowsy state and told her that she would in future enjoy the thunderstorms as noble expressions of nature. The whole procedure took a few minutes. Yet after some summer months she wrote me a letter which clearly indicated this characteristic compromise between the habitual dread and the reënforced counter idea. "I have the same sick dread at the sight of thunder clouds that I have always had, but I seem to have gotten somehow a most desperate determination to control my fear. I have done this to the extent of keeping my eyes open and looking at the storm. Is that hypnotism or pride?"

A young married woman of the West had suffered always from hysterical attacks in response to any sharp sudden impressions, especially sudden loud noises. The banging of a door, but worst of all a thunderstorm, could produce hours of weeping and crying and desperate mental condition with all expressions of excitement. Her husband wanted me to hypnotize her but I preferred another way. I tried to get her memory back to the earliest case of which she could think of this hysterical response. As long as we were in ordinary conversation, she could not trace it beyond about her twelfth year. But when I brought her into a drowsy state, her memory revived older experiences and finally settled at a school experience in her seventh year of age. She then had an excitable country school-teacher who relied on whipping the children. Once her neighbor in the class did something forbidden. Her teacher mistook her for the culprit and began to whip her most forcibly before she could explain anything; and while the punishment was going on and she began to bleed from a wound, she all the time felt that she wanted to express her innocence and could not speak. After that, evidently the first attack of hysteric character followed. From that time on any sudden impression released the same group of reactions. The suppressed emotion had evidently become a psychophysical "complex." As soon as I had reached this starting point of her pathological history, I asked her to bring back to consciousness as many details as possible of that first incident. She told me all the names and described the classroom and brought herself vividly into the whole situation. Then I asked her to tell me the whole story once more and to express strongly her innocence and the wrongness of the punishment, and when she had completed her account, brought out with fullest indignation, I had her tell the whole thing once more and then a third and a fourth time, until she was quite tired out from it. That was all I did. Very soon after, the husband reported that there was a great improvement in every respect, no hysteric attacks, only slight discomfort. Most of the stimuli which had previously produced strong reactions now passed without any disturbance and even thunderstorms were experienced with relative ease. A year later they came once more to Cambridge, and she simply passed once more through the same process of discharge which seems now to have removed the symptoms still further.

A gentleman with a decidedly psychasthenic constitution developed a tendency to hesitate in walking on the street. It was not a complete stumbling but a disturbing inhibition, which set in when he was walking alone and his attention was not absorbed by something on the street. He believed that it came on most strongly when he looked down at the pavement. He suffered from it vehemently and avoided going on the street alone. He was unable to connect it with any starting point. He interpreted it as merely a symptom of overwork. But going with him through all kinds of experiences which he had had on the street in previous years, we finally found that once he was running to catch a street car, when he suddenly saw almost immediately before him a big hole dug out for laying gas pipes. He was able to stop himself quickly enough not to fall into the hole but he got a strong emotional shock from the experience. He, himself, did not think that his walking troubles set in immediately after this shock. Yet the hypothesis seemed to me sufficiently justified that there existed a connection, even though some weeks lay between that first experience and the first observation of the abnormal inhibition in walking. On that basis I tried to train a new associative connection. I made him drowsy and asked him to think himself once more into the situation of his run for the car but as soon as he reached the hole to jump over it. He went through this motor feature on ten successive days with new and ever new energy and from that time up to the present the trouble on the street has disappeared entirely.

The woman, aged thirty-two, was a saleswoman in a large store selling gentlemen's gloves and ties. She suffered from time to time by attacks of vague anxiety in which her heart showed vehement palpitation. There were paleness and perspiration and at the height a nervous trembling together with a feeling of despair. These attacks were not frequent, separated sometimes by weeks, sometimes by months, but troubling her exceedingly. She had been assured by a physician that her heart was normal and that she was probably overworked. She could find absolutely no source of the disturbance. After a long conversation, I was also unable to discover any direct or indirect causes until I worked on the basis of those theories which we have discussed, the theories which connect hysteric symptoms with chance intrusions which stand in relations to past suppressed emotions of sexual character. The patient absolutely denied any present sexual emotions. She had been engaged about eight years before and acknowledged that at that time there were strong sexual feelings connected with her fiancé, who broke the engagement. Psychoanalytic methods now brought it to full clearness that she had her first attack after selling a pair of gloves and fitting them to the hand of a male customer who had a certain similarity to her fiancé. It was not possible to trace this in the same way for later cases too, but it seems that bodily contact with a man by fitting gloves preceded every attack. All this was brought out partly by questions, partly by free ascending associations while she, herself, believed that she simply pronounced nonsense words as they came to her mind, and partly it was secured in a half-hypnotic state. I came to the conclusion that the suppressed sexual emotions at the breaking of the engagement were the primary cause of the disease. The similarity of the first customer together with the tactual sensations had evidently touched that complex and brought the suppressed emotion to an explosion which frequently takes the form of palpitation and similar symptoms. Later the mere tactual sensation alone produced by the contact with the hand of a man, possibly with a similar optical impression, perhaps also with the sound of the voice, brought back the reaction. Instead of giving treatment, I insisted that she change stores, and become saleswoman in a house where she would have to do only with women, and to sell articles which did not bring her into personal contact with customers. After more than six months of work in her new place, she reported that the attacks had not come back again.

"I have been a stammerer the greater part of my life and have visited every stammering school in the country, but the relief obtained has been temporary and in most cases I was not benefited at all. I am convinced that stammering is due wholly to an abnormal mental condition, which consists of an unreasoning fear that takes possession of the individual when he attempts to utter certain sounds. It is simply a lack of confidence inspired by numberless failures to articulate properly and is not caused by any organic trouble, because, taking my own case for example, I can at times talk as fluently and easily as anyone. I am firmly convinced that stammering can be cured by hypnotic suggestion. If you could get me in the hypnotic state and suggest to me repeatedly that from thenceforth I would have easy fluent speech, I feel absolutely certain that such would be the case."

"At times I stammer very badly. In an ordinary conversation it is scarcely perceptible, but it is almost impossible for me to make an explanation or relate an incident or tell an anecdote. I began to stammer when I was about seven years of age—I am twenty-nine now—and continued until I was seventeen, when I broke myself of it by reading aloud. It came back on me about a year ago, at which time I was laboring under a very severe nervous strain on account of business matters. I have since tried to break myself of it in the way that I did at first, reading aloud, but have been unable to do so. Can it be cured by hypnotic treatment or suggestion? Can any hypnotist of ordinary ability do it?"

A physician had read in a well-known book on hysteria about a case in which a girl was troubled by a constant effort to move the big toe in her shoes. This idea worked on him as a suggestion for several months. At my advice he fought it by auto-suggestion. He brought himself into a slightly drowsy state by staring into a crystal ball and assuring himself by spoken sentences with monotonous repetition for a long while that he has perfectly the power to hold the toe at rest. From the second day only a slight kinæsthetic sensation remained; the movement itself disappeared.

A young lady once noticed in a man a different color in the two eyes. It gave her an uncanny feeling, together with the natural impulse to compare the two eyes. Accordingly she shifted her own eyes from one eyeball to the other in the man's face. The accent which this shifting impulse had received by the disagreeable feeling evidently forced her to repeat this movement with everyone. At first it became half a play, but soon a disturbing habit and finally an intolerable impulse. Whenever she talked with anyone, she lost control of her eyes and was obliged to enter into a kind of pendulum movement from eye to eye. The situation became so unendurable that the thought of suicide began to occur to her. I hypnotized her four times, suggesting to her complete indifference as to the face of those with whom she spoke and at the same time certain new habits of fixation. The impulse lost its hold and when I saw her last, it had completely disappeared.

Only a short time ago I dealt with a young man whom his parents and a chauffeur had accompanied to Boston, exclusively for the purpose of watching him constantly while I was to attempt to cure him from excessive whiskey drinking. The chauffeur accompanied him from his room in the Boston hotel to the threshold of my laboratory. All through the day he was with his parents, and at the hotel the management had given the strictest orders not to sell any drink to the young spendthrift. He was an earlier student of mine and had attached himself to me with such an apparent sincerity as removed every possible doubt of his pledge. Intentionally I had not even asked him for a pledge not to drink but only for a pledge to confess to me the next day if he ever should take any alcohol. In a tentative way I suggested to him in a half hypnotic state on the first day that he would feel disgust for whiskey. I did not expect much of an improvement before at least three or four treatments. I was therefore most surprised when he most solemnly assured me the next day that he awoke in the morning with an assured feeling that he should never touch whiskey again and that he had not the slightest desire for it. Instead of a systematic development of suggestions, I confined myself therefore to a mere repetition of the treatment of the first day and as every morning the same assurance came forth, there seemed to be no need for any variation. It was not before the fifth day that I discovered that he had taken from the start a pint of whiskey every day. When he first arrived he had bribed a laundress of the hotel to bring to his room every day the whiskey hidden in the laundry and he drank it during the night. Then I declined any further participation.

A well-known professional man of fifty years, through a long bachelorhood, was accustomed to close his work at four o'clock and then to sit comfortably in his study with a book and an unlimited supply of brandy. He took one cognac after another and every evening he was completely intoxicated. He married a young wife and felt the need of changing his habits, the more as he himself saw symptoms of his excess which alarmed him. When he came to me, I saw that he was seriously wishing to give up, and he understood himself that there was only the one way, namely, complete abstinence. He felt that he could not reach it by his own will power alone and sought my aid. I hypnotized him six times, suggesting at first a reduction to four drinks, then to two, then to one and then to pure mineral water. I concentrated my effort on stirring up the antagonistic attitude, the dislike of the smell of brandy and the aversion to its taste. The effect was excellent. After the fifth time the mental torture which he had felt in the first afternoons had completely disappeared. I considered further hypnotizing superfluous and felt sure after the sixth time that the man was cured. For about a year he remained abstinent, but in the meantime his professional life brought severe disappointments, and with cool consideration he decided that he might have at least some pleasure from life and forget its miseries. Accordingly after a year he determined again to take some brandy in his study, and of course, that led rapidly to an increase of the dose and today he is probably at the old point. And yet it may be said with correctness that psychotherapy had done its duty. If at the right moment before he took the first step again, even the slightest counter-suggestion had been applied, the disastrous second development could have been easily avoided.

A man who was formerly station master on a railroad had been operated on in a hospital after an accident, and as some pain in the hip remained which disturbed his sleep, the physician of the hospital gave him some morphine and provided him with the material for morphine injection after leaving the hospital. Then began the usual story. He became more and more dependent upon his injection, the dose was steadily increased, he found unscrupulous physicians who yielded to his demand for morphine prescriptions; he lost his position with the railway by the growing effects of the morphine poisoning, he became divorced, sank lower and lower, his daily dose fluctuating between thirty-five and forty grains a day, and when he came to me, he presented a picture of the lowest type of hopeless manhood. He spent practically the whole day in bed and was only able to totter slowly along with a cane. He assured me that life was hell for him. He could not sleep, he could not eat, he could not think, he had made up his mind to commit suicide if I could not help him. I foresaw that it would in the best case demand months of insistent energy to make a man out of that unfortunate wreck. He had gone through three different morphine cures in three sanitariums and none had helped him, and every physician whom he had consulted had declared his case as beyond any physical cure. I decided to make the somewhat disproportionate sacrifice of time in order to study whether even such an extreme case of morphinism is accessible to psychotherapeutic treatment. Four months later, he left my laboratory looking like an athlete, strong and vigorous, joyful and energetic. For three weeks he had not received any morphine, had good appetite, slept well, and had happily married. As his wife was a trained nurse, she will take good care that no new slip shall ever occur.

There was nothing remarkable in those four months of treatment. He was easily hypnotized, and I hypnotized him at first every day, then every second day, then every week. It was without difficulty that I reduced the forty grains to about six grains a day. Then the struggle began. To test the case as a strictly psychological problem I left the effort entirely to his own will, that is, I did not deprive him of the morphine supply but left the regulation in his own hands. During that whole winter he had a bottle with a thousand morphine tablets standing on his desk. Thus he would have been entirely able to satisfy any craving, but by his own will he followed my suggestions and never took more than I permitted. It meant a terrible struggle. The tortures which he had to pass through were perhaps worse than those which he had experienced at the time of his lowest downfall. They came to a focus when he tried to go from five grains to three grains a day and then again when he approached half a grain. From there he had to move to a fourth of a grain, then to an eighth, and even that had still to be divided into four different doses which were then reduced to three, to two, and finally to one dose and ultimately to injections of warm water. A rapid increase in general strength and a return of appetite for food began when he had reached the five grain limit. I did not allow on any occasion the introduction of a substitute. On the other hand, I added every day suggestions covering the various secondary symptoms, especially the pains in the stomach and the feelings of faintness and the emotional depression.