create. More than this, they have to
acknowledge it to gain a basis for their attack. Just because the
hypnotizer can entirely change the desires and passions, the habits and
perversities of the suffering victim, he seems to them a moral wrongdoer
who negates the principle of human freedom. A forcible book of recent
days calls the suggestive power of the psychotherapist "The Great
Psychological Crime." It says to the hypnotist: "By your own testimony,
you stand convicted of applying a process which deprives your subjects
of the inalienable right and power of individual self-control. In
proportion as you deprive him of the power of self-control, you deprive
him of that upon which his individual responsibility and moral status
depend. In proportion as you deprive him of the free control and
exercise of those powers of the soul upon which his individual
responsibility and moral status depend, you thereby rob him of those
powers upon which he must depend for the achievement of individual
immortality."

But this censure too is entirely mistaken, not because it urges the
purposive views against the causal but because it is in error as to the
facts. Such critics are fully under the influence of the startling
results which are reached; they do not take the trouble to examine the
long and difficult way which has had to be traversed with patience and
energy. It is quite true that if I hypnotize a man and suggest to him to
take up after awaking the book which lies on my table, he follows my
suggestion without conflict and in a certain sense without freedom. He
feels a simple impulse to go to the table and lift the book and, as no
stronger natural desire and no moral objection stand in the way, he
carries out that meaningless impulse and perhaps even invents a foolish
motive to explain to himself why he wanted to look at that book. But
after a long experience, I have my doubts as to whether a man was ever
cured in such a way by hypnotism of serious disturbances and of those
anomalous actions which the critics want to see overcome by the
patient's own moral efforts. On the contrary, every suggestion has to
rely on the efforts and struggles of the patient himself and all that
the psychotherapists can give him is help in his own moral fight. His
own will is presupposition for being hypnotized and for realizing the
suggestion. If again and again I hesitate to undertake new cases, it is
just because I have to see during the treatment to