me: "I come of a race of strong women and am
not hysterical or easily frightened by many things that disturb
women. Since my fifteenth year I have been seized by hallucinations
of absurd or serious nature which no reasoning could explain away
and which have gradually undermined my power of resistance to them.
At the age of twenty-two, after a year of unusually hard work, my
nervous endurance gave way, and with this breakdown came a sense of
fear and a horror of crime that I have been unable to overcome. I
have never felt the slightest inclination toward wrongdoing. It is
a feeling rather that my shrinking from any mention of evil makes
it impossible for me to listen or think rationally when such things
are discussed. This feeling has seemed to change my whole attitude
toward life and has left me without power to control my facial
expression or carriage when it takes possession of me. I have been
able to teach more successfully than I could hope, but it is only
by cutting myself off from the friendships and pleasures incident
to my life that I am able to accomplish my work. I have fought this
trouble alone and will still do so if there is no help, but the
thought that it is the source of great distress to those dear to me
makes it very hard."

A few weeks later the lady insisted on coming to Cambridge. I found
that there had never been any hallucinations and that she used the
word in her letter only to indicate some insistent memory images
which had never taken the vividness of real impressions. In the
presence of her friend, I hypnotized her deeply and strengthened
through urgent suggestions her consciousness of her having done the
morally right thing at every situation in her life and her
conviction that she never did and never would commit a crime. Here
as always, if possible, I left alone the emotional idea but
reenforced the opposite. The effect was an immediate one. She felt
freer the next day than she had felt for years. I repeated the
treatment a few times and she assured me that the feeling had
disappeared entirely.

I take the rather severe case of a woman of fifty.

The highly educated and refined lady had lost her husband by an
accident in Switzerland, which had been misrepresented by some of
the newspapers as suicide. Two years later