a slightly drowsy state by staring into a
crystal ball and assuring himself by spoken sentences with
monotonous repetition for a long while that he has perfectly the
power to hold the toe at rest. From the second day only a slight
kinaesthetic sensation remained; the movement itself disappeared.

Or a more unusual case.

A young lady once noticed in a man a different color in the two
eyes. It gave her an uncanny feeling, together with the natural
impulse to compare the two eyes. Accordingly she shifted her own
eyes from one eyeball to the other in the man's face. The accent
which this shifting impulse had received by the disagreeable
feeling evidently forced her to repeat this movement with everyone.
At first it became half a play, but soon a disturbing habit and
finally an intolerable impulse. Whenever she talked with anyone,
she lost control of her eyes and was obliged to enter into a kind
of pendulum movement from eye to eye. The situation became so
unendurable that the thought of suicide began to occur to her. I
hypnotized her four times, suggesting to her complete indifference
as to the face of those with whom she spoke and at the same time
certain new habits of fixation. The impulse lost its hold and when
I saw her last, it had completely disappeared.

By far more frequent than such neutral impulses are the desires, for
instance, of the alcoholist. On the whole it may be said that
psychotherapy can gain its easiest triumphs in the field of alcoholism
and a wide propagation of psychotherapeutic methods and of a thorough
understanding of psychotherapy would be fully justified, even if no
other field were accessible but that of the desire for alcoholic
intemperance. The moral disaster and economic ruin resulting from
alcoholic intemperance, the physical harm to the drinker and to his
offspring is so enormous, and the temporary cure of the victim is so
probable that the movement certainly deserves most serious interest. Yet
I speak of temporary cure and I refer here especially to the restriction
with which I introduced the psychotherapeutic methods in general. They
do not deal with diseases but with symptoms; and they certainly do not
deal with constitutions, but with results of the cooeperation of
constitution and circumstances. That the given constitution may be
brought anew under conditions which again stir up similar