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 desire rules, though possibly it contains an element of fear. However this may be, from your three cases I cannot draw any ethical distinction between the “unconscious readiness towards the hypnotist” and the “transference to the doctor” which should avail to condemn a combination of hypnotism and psychoanalysis as a method of treatment. You will ask why I cling to the use of hypnotism; or rather of hypnoidal states. Because I think there are cases that can be much more rapidly cured thereby, than through a purely psychoanalytic treatment. For example, in no more than five or six interviews I cured a fifteen-year-old girl who had suffered from enuresis nocturna from infancy, but was otherwise thoroughly healthy, gifted, and pre-eminent at school: she had previously tried all sorts of treatment without any result.

Perhaps I ought to have sought out the psychoanalytic connexion between the enuresis and her psychosexual attitude and explained it to her, etc., but I could not, she had only the short Easter holidays for treatment: so I just hypnotised her and the tiresome trouble vanished. It was a lasting cure.

In psychoanalysis I use hypnosis to help the patient to overcome “resistances.”

Further, I use light hypnosis in association with psychoanalysis, to hasten the advance when the “re-education” stage comes.

For example, a patient afflicted with washing-mania was sent to me after a year’s psychocathartic treatment by Dr. X. The symbolic meaning of her washing-ceremonial was first made plain to her; she became more and more agitated during the “abreaction” of alleged traumata in childhood, because she had persuaded herself by auto-suggestion that she was too old to be cured, that she saw no “images,” etc. So I used hypnosis to help her to diminish the number of her washings, “so that the anxiety-feeling would be banished”; and to train her to throw things on the ground and pick them up again without washing her hands afterwards, etc.