by the mental treatment; we shall have to
take notice of this important result but that is strictly not a
therapeutic effect on the bodily symptoms. Moreover, purely psychical
effects may give an impression as if the bodily symptom itself has been
removed.

To begin with the latter case, it is especially the inhibition of pain
which easily makes one believe that a bodily disturbance is successfully
treated. I have repeatedly seen cases in which I tried by suggestion to
soften the pain resulting from a peripheral disturbance like
inflammations, rheumatism, decayed teeth and so on. The effect was often
such a total disappearance of the pain that the patient himself was
inclined to believe that the objective disease had been ended, while in
reality the state of the diseased organ was not changed at all. It has
often happened that I tried to cure a person of certain mental symptoms
by suggestion, ignoring entirely the existence of some pain resulting
from a bodily disease with which I had nothing to do. Yet the suggestion
of improvement seemed almost to irradiate and the pain disappeared in
spite of having been ignored by the hypnotizer. For instance, I treated
a woman who suffered from psychasthenic obsessions, fearing all the time
that something would happen to her child. I did not give any direct
attention to the fact that she had had for years a painful disease of
the bladder for which she was constantly treated by a specialist. But
while I did not mention the bladder in my hypnotic suggestion, yet the
abdominal pain disappeared together with the obsession and the situation
might easily have suggested that the bladder trouble was a nervous one
which had been cured by the hypnotic sleep. The fact was that the
bladder disease was not influenced by the mental treatment at all, and
needed a continuation of the same local treatment. It was only the
psychophysical pain in the brain which had been inhibited.

Quite parallel to the disappearance of the organic pain sensation is the
arising of a general feeling of improvement. This organic sensation of
general betterment may again be a strictly mental occurrence without any
objective reference to a real improvement in the bodily conditions. Yet
again that easily gives the impression of an important change in the
bodily conditions themselves. The miraculous cures of various diseases
through mystic agencies generally belong to this category. There is no
doubt that often the migr