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 convincing tone. I, too, for a time practised hypnotic suggestion enthusiastically. But there befell me three dubious incidents which I want you to note:—

1. Once there came to me to be hypnotised for various neurotic troubles a withered peasant-woman of some fifty years old. She was not easy to hypnotise, was very restless, kept opening her eyes—but at last I did succeed. When I waked her after about half an hour she seized my hand and with many words testified to her overflowing gratitude. I said: “But you are by no means cured yet, so keep your thanks till the end of the treatment.” She: “I am not thanking you for that, but—(blushing and whispering)—because you have been so decent.” So she said, looked at me with a sort of tender admiration and departed. I gazed long at the spot where she had stood and asked myself, confounded, “So decent?”—good heavens! surely she hadn’t imagined, somehow or other. . . . This glimpse made me suspect for the first time that possibly the loose-minded person, by means of that notorious feminine (I should at that time have said “animal”) directness of instinct, understood more about the essence of hypnotism than I with all my knowledge of the scientific profundity of the text-books. Therein lay my harmlessness.

2. Next came a pretty, coquettish, seventeen-year-old girl with a harassed, suspicious mother. The young daughter had suffered since early girlhood from enuresis nocturna, which, among other difficulties, hindered her from going to a boarding-school abroad.

At once I thought of the old woman and her wisdom. I tried to hypnotise the girl; she laughed affectedly and prevented hypnosis for twenty minutes. Of course I kept quiet and thought: I know why you laugh; you have already fallen in love with me, but I will give you proof of my decency in gratitude for your wasting my time with your challenging laughter. I succeeded in hypnotising her. Success followed at once. The enuresis stopped, and I therefore informed the young lady later that, instead of Wednesday, I would not see her again for hypnosis till the following