, that
the whole galvanic sensation was the result of suggestion.

Such a method demands patience and good will. The prejudices and
deeply-rooted hypochondriac ideas, foolish theories of the patient and
pessimistic emotions which have become habitual, must be removed piece
by piece until the central symptoms themselves can be undermined and
explored. It often takes hours of careful and fatiguing reasoning, in
which at any time the patient may suddenly slip back to his old ideas.
Yet if the explanatory arguments have once succeeded in making the
patient himself believe firmly that his whole trouble resulted from
suggestion only, the inhibitory effect of this idea may be an excellent
one. The only serious defect of the method is that it often does not
work. The credit which neurologists of today give to its effectiveness
seems to me much too high. Even slight neurasthenic and psychasthenic
disturbances remain too often in complete power when the patient is
fully convinced that they originated with an emotional excitement which
has long since lost its feeling value or that it resulted from a chance
suggestion picked out from indifferent surroundings. The patient knows
it and yet goes on suffering from the fruitless fight of his will
against the intruder. Where mere reasoning is entirely successful, I am
inclined to suspect that an element of suggestion has always been
superadded. The authority of the physician has created a state of
reenforced suggestibility in which the argument convinces, not by its
logic but by its impressiveness.

This element of suggestion is quite obvious when the argument takes the
form of persuasion, a psychotherapeutic method which has found its
independent development. Whoever seeks to persuade relies on the mental
fringe of his propositions. The idea is not to work by its own meaning
but by the manner of its presentation, by its impressiveness, by the
authority, by the warmth of the voice, by the sympathy which stands
behind it, by the attractiveness with which it is offered, by the
advantages which are in sight. Thus persuasion relies on personal powers
to secure conviction where the logic of the argument is insufficient to
overcome contradictions. But just for that reason persuasion is after
all only a special kind of suggestion.

Other methods work on the same basis. Prominent among them is the
psychotherapeutic effect of a formal assurance. The psychotherapist
assures the patient that he