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 CHAPTER IX

While the psychoanalyst, of course, knows of this therapeutic tendency to extricate the patient from his unhealthy phantasies, he also knows just how far this mere extricating of neurotic patients from their phantasies goes. As physicians, we should never think of preferring a difficult and complicated method, assailed by all authorities, to a simple, clear and easy one without good reason. I am perfectly well-acquainted with hypnotic suggestion, and with Dubois' method of persuasion, but I do not use these methods, on account of their relative inadequacy. For the same reason, I do not use the direct "ré-éducation de la volonté" as the psychoanalytic method gives me better results.

In applying psychoanalysis we must grant the regressive phantasies of the patient, for psychoanalysis has a much broader outlook, as regards the valuation of symptoms, than have the above psychotherapeutic methods. These all emanate from the assertion that a neurosis is an absolute morbid formation.

The reigning school of neurology has never thought of considering neurosis as a healing process also, and of attributing to the neurotic formations a quite special teleological meaning. Neurosis, like every other disease, is a compromise between the morbid tendencies, and the normal function. Modern medicine no longer considers fever as the illness itself, but a purposeful reaction of the organism. Psychoanalysis, likewise, no longer conceives a neurosis as eo ipso morbid, but as also having a meaning and a purpose. From this there follows the more reserved and expectant attitude of psychoanalysis towards neurosis. Psychoanalysis does not judge the value of the symptoms, but first tries to understand what tendencies lie beneath these symptoms. If we were able to abolish a neurosis in the same way, for instance, as a cancer is destroyed, then at the same time there would be destroyed a great amount of available energy also. We save this energy, that is, we make it serve the purposes