In any case, I give the patients as much as they are able to take of my own understanding of the subject.  There are no secrets in this method.  The patient is treated as a rational human being who has nothing to lose and everything to gain by the fullest knowledge that he is able to acquire.  Without forcing him to plunge in over his depth, I encourage him to understand himself to the fullest possible extent.  Besides individual private conferences, we have twice a day an informal gathering of all the patients in my household—­“the family” as we like to call ourselves—­for a reading or talk on the various ways of the body and the mind, which need to be understood for normal living and for the cure of nerves.  Very often people of only average education, long without the opportunity of study, gain in a surprisingly short time enough insight to make new adaptations and cure themselves.  For this, a college education is not nearly so important as an open mind.  It is because of the success of this method that I have been encouraged to reach a larger number of people by means of a book, based on the same plan of re-education.

=Explanation vs.  Suggestion.= Re-education through this kind of explanation is simply a matter of learning the truth and acting upon it.  It is a process of real enlightenment, and is very different from suggestion which trades upon the patient’s credulity, increasing his already exaggerated suggestibility.

Freud illustrates the difference between suggestion and psycho-analysis by saying that suggestion is like painting and psycho-analysis like sculpture.  Painting adds something from the outside, plastering over the canvas with extraneous matter, while sculpture cuts away the unnecessary material and reveals the angel in the marble.  So suggestion covers over the real trouble by crying, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace.”  Without attempting to remove the cause, it says to the patient:  “You have no pain.  You are not tired.  You will sleep to-night.  You will be cheerful.”  Sometimes the suggestion works and sometimes it does not, but at best the relief is likely to be a mere temporary makeshift.  The symptom may be relieved, but the character is not changed and therefore no permanent relief is assured.  It is far better for a nervous person to say to himself, “There is something wrong and I am going to find it,” than to keep repeating over and over, “There is nothing wrong,” and so on through a list of half-believed autosuggestions.

On the other hand, psycho-analysis, and this kind of re-education based on psycho-analytic principles, do not pay a great deal of attention to the individual symptom.  Instead of adding from without they try to take away whatever has proved a hindrance to normal growth and development, and to remove unnecessary resistances which are responsible for the symptom, and which have been holding the patient back from the fullest self-expression.