Introduction

Freud grappled long and courageously with the demon suggestion discovering it under every clinical rock he overturned during his long and productive investigative work. He attempted to repudiate its role in psychoanalysis (Collins, 1980), labeling it a meaningless term, a notion so elastic and illusive as not to warrant serious consideration. He assembled an arsenal of technical devices to mitigate against its influence, including his infamous trio of analytic restraint: abstinence, anonymity, and neutrality, wielded by the familiar surgically dispassionate, opaquely reflecting, therapeutically unenthusiastic, intellectually curious objective scientist conducting research on, to borrow Stone's felicitous appellation, “the patient as cadaver” (1961, p. 15). Freud tried to co-opt suggestive influence by capturing and restraining it within his technical approach as unobjectionable positive transference, the embryonic appearance of our now familiar therapeutic alliance, as we shall see, a concept some consider more apparitional than substantial. He invoked that questionable purification procedure, training analysis, to insure against inadvertent suggestive proclivities among his fellow practitioners. The analyst's integrity, suspiciously close to his authority, the latter seen by many as the preferred secret residence of the suggestive devil himself, was proffered as the ultimate safeguard against irrational influence. Freud began as a hypnotist and at the end of his career, he was still apologizing for his youthful waywardness. Psychoanalysis, as a science or antiscience, whatever your bias, continues to struggle with suggestion, and with the suggestion of suggestion. Nowadays, the battles are pitched mainly from within, our isolation from the rest of behavioral science alarmingly tolerated in many quarters. Such battles take the form of our current debates about historical and narrative