counteracting the hypnotic power of his enemy or for the
purpose of liberating him from his exasperating fixed idea.
Moreover, I found that his voices had no hallucinatory character,
but were merely sound images. I decided to make the experiment
without great hope of success.

I hypnotized the man deeply and suggested that no one can have
power over his actions, that he is the responsible originator of
everything that he does and that no one can influence him and that
from that hour he would feel free from any telepathic intrigue. The
effect of the very insistent and urgently repeated hypnotic
suggestion during the first rather long treatment was such a
surprisingly good one that I decided to continue the
psychotherapeutic cure. I hypnotized him daily for two weeks. The
belief in the real wrong doings of an enemy disappeared entirely
from the first. It was at once apprehended as a mere obsessing idea
in the own mind and this idea itself began to be resolved. It lost
its unity; the absurd impulses were still felt but they became less
and less connected with the idea of another man, and as soon as
they were rightly understood as doings of the own mind, the
opposite motives gained in strength. A stronger and stronger appeal
to his own power made these motives more and more influential.
Slowly the association of the influence of the other man faded away
entirely. I intentionally had not given any attention to the
pseudo-voices, inasmuch as they had not taken any relation to the
ideational delusion. I therefore did not include them in my
suggestions, as I consider it wise to confine hypnotic suggestions
always to as few points as possible. Yet these voices decreased
too. At a certain point in the cure I substituted--to save my own
time--an autosuggestive influence, or rather a mixed one, inasmuch
as I had him read ten times a day a letter of mine which contained
appropriate suggestions. After about six weeks, all the
disturbances for which he had sought my advice had disappeared.

Obsessing ideas of such personal influence involve of course always a
certain amount of emotional excitement and they may lead us to the
unlimited field of disturbances in which the persecuting idea is
surrounded by emotional attitudes. Analysis shows easily that the
emotion is an essential fact