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."

Even in cases where the disease itself is inaccessible to
psychotherapeutic treatment, the superadded grief and worry brought on
by the disease might yield to the mental influence and the whole
situation would to a high degree be transformed for the better by it. I
have often been asked to hypnotize in such cases, where the depression
was wrongly taken as a part of the nervous disease; sometimes I agreed
to do it in spite of feeling sure that the disease itself could not be
removed. I quote an instance.

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
concentrate