ggestion more liberating than heterosuggestion if the development
has not gone too far. Of course autosuggestion can never take hypnotic
character, but makes use with profit of the transition state before
normal sleep. The type of these cases which are everywhere about us may
be indicated by the following letter.

The writer is a young woman of twenty-four, whom I did not know
personally. She wrote to me as follows: "I am a writer by
profession and during the last year and a half have been connected
with a leading magazine. In my work, I was constantly associated
with one man, the managing editor. This man exerted a very peculiar
influence over me. With everyone else connected with the magazine,
I was my natural self and at ease, but the minute this man came
into the room, I became an entirely different person, timid,
nervous, and awkward, always placing myself and my work in a bad
light. But under this man's influence, I did a great deal of
literary work, my own and his too. I felt that he willed me to do
it. The effect of this influence was that I suffered constantly
from deep fits of depression almost amounting to melancholia. This
lasted until last fall, when I felt that I should lose my mind if I
stayed under his influence any longer. So I resigned my position
and broke away. Then I felt like a person who, having a drug to
stimulate him to do a certain amount of work, has that drug
suddenly taken away, and without it I am unable to write at
all...." I wrote to the young lady that she could cure herself
without hypnotism and without my personal participation. I urged
her simply to speak to herself early in the morning and especially
in the evening before going to sleep, and to say to herself that
the man had never helped her at her work, but that she did it
entirely of her own power, and that he had never had any influence
on it, and that she can write splendidly since she has left the
place, and much better than before. A few months later, she came to
Cambridge and thanked me for the complete success which the
auto-suggestive treatment had secured. She was completely herself
again and was fully successful in filling a literary position in
which she had to write the editorials, the book reviews, the
dramatic criticisms, and the social news. As a matter of course,