Psycho-Therapeutics: From Art to Science

This is an attempt toward a critical and constructive discussion of suggestion in its relation to an evolution in psychotherapy. Such a discussion is made necessary by the persistence of conflicting opinions about it. Historically, psychoanalytic therapy is an outgrowth of suggestion therapy. Many psychoanalysts are of the opinion that at least the method of direct and specific suggestion has been sloughed off. Dr. William Stekel goes further and insists that “psychoanalysis and suggestion are opposites.” His form of statement implies that he includes every form of suggestion. All opinions expressive of such irreconcilable contrasts arouse the suspicions that their authors have made an unconscious delusional projection of a so-called split personality. For modern scientists, who view nature as a process, there are no sharp lines of demarcation between seeming opposites. The well unified personality will not see them, even in the subjective processes of human nature. The split personality will see only the apparently irreconcilable symptoms, and makes its descriptions accordingly. If Stekel's contrasts are a delusional projection, that would explain also his complete avoidance of any reference to, or description of those subjective processes, or of their conditioning factors, which are involved in psychoanalytic cures. Indeed, in the following quotation he seems to deny the existence of any method for conditioning the healing process. He says that “it is not the method but the physician who heals.”1 If it is not the physician's method but his personality that heals, then it is hard for some of us to believe that anything other than suggestion brought about that change of symptoms which Stekel miscalls a “cure.” Apparently Stekel is wholly unconscious of his own unavoidable suggestions. This all seems as if on the level of magic “cures.”

In , Otto Rank wrote of “readmitting” hypnosis or other methods of suggestion into psychoanalytic technique.2 That statement implies