You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Day by day and in every way there are getting to be more and more kinds of psychoanalysis and what to do with them is becoming quite a problem. The latest addition to the ranks is psychoanalysis combined with suggestion and this is the thesis which Dr. C. Baudouin has undertaken to defend in his last book, “Studies in Psychoanalysis.”
Suggestion, thinks the author, is so widely used in psychoanalysis that it might as well be taken advantage of. It may aid psychoanalysis by helping the patient to revive better his reminiscences and dreams, effect better transfer, but above all to so influence his mind as to make him accept certain ideas suggested by the suggestor; the result of such an acceptance leading to the disappearance of the disturbing symptoms. It is the latter form of suggestion that Baudouin particularly emphasizes and here it is not at all clear just how suggestion is so fruitfully combined with psychoanalysis, for the author is never specific on this point. It seems that he takes the patient's dreams, associations or productions, interprets them in his own way—this is the psychoanalytic part—figures out what is likely to be the trouble with the patient and then orders this trouble and the symptoms to disappear. The suggestor, says the author, suggests the end and because of the “law of subconscious teleology” (formulated by the author), the subconscious, when a certain end has been suggested, will find means for its realization. Later “the details confirmed our interpretation.” Baudouin's dream technic is a very smooth one for he finds in them confirmation of his thesis. Thus one patient gave him a dream which ended as follows: “It is impossible to clean this, it must be thoroughly done up.” To Baudouin this phrase symbolizes the patient's intimate reaction to the respective methods, for—“to clean “is psychoanalysis: to” do up thoroughly” is suggestion.
While suggestion as advocated above is quite good, Baudouin, offers a better form yet and it consists in