Though Freud discarded hypnosis and suggestion early in his career, he continued to be preoccupied with suggestion throughout his life, not as a therapeutic method, but as an idea with the capacity to discount his work, and also with a paradoxical capacity to define the distinctiveness of what he was about. he defended his work against the imputation that it was merely a fresh edition of the power of suggestion by dismissing suggestion as meaningless (though continuing to use the term), by allowing it a minor, but technically controlled, role in psychoanalytic therapy, and by formal reassurance that he had never misused suggestion. The importance of suggestion in the work of Freud and his successors is mainly as a connotation of irrationality as the explanation and method of therapy, and the consequence of abandoning the search for rationality as the process of cure is the loss not only of the distinctiveness of psychoanalysis, but also of its humanist core and its mature optimism.