=Incantation vs.  Knowledge.= There came to me one day a well-known public woman who had suffered from nervous indigestion for many years.  As she was able to be with me for only one night, we had time for just one conversation, but in that time she discovered what she was doing and lost her indigestion.  In the course of the conversation she turned to me, saying:  “Doctor, I know what a force suggestion is.  I believe in its power.  Will you tell me why I have not been able to cure myself of this trouble?  Every night after I go to bed I repeat over and over these Bible verses,” naming a number of passages relating to God’s goodness and care for His children.  My answer was something like this:  “You are too intelligent a woman to be cured by an incantation.  When you feel surging up within you the sense of God’s goodness, or when you actually want to realize His loving kindness, then by all means repeat the verses.  But don’t prostitute those wonderful words by making them into a charm and then expect them to cure your indigestion.  It is a desecration of the words and a denial of your own intelligence.  Autosuggestion is a powerful force, but real psychotherapy is based not on the mechanical repetition of any set of words, but on a knowledge of the truth.”

=The “Bullying Method."= Sometimes, to be sure, explanation is not enough.  The brain paths between the associated ideas are so deeply worn that no amount of persuasion avails.  It is easy for the doubter to say:  “Well, that sounds very well, but my case is different.  I have tried over and over again and I know.”  With people of this sort, an ounce of demonstration is worth a pound of argument.

By way of illustration we might mention the man who couldn’t eat eggs.  To be sure, he had tried many times but always had suffered the most intense cramps in his stomach, and no amount of talk could make him believe that an egg was not poison to him.  I took the straight road of simply proving to him that he was mistaken, and had him eat an egg.  After a time of apprehension and retching, he vomited the egg, thinking, of course, that he had proved his point.  To his astonishment, I said, “Now, let’s go and eat another.”  With great consternation, he finally complied, evidently expecting to die on the spot; but as I immediately prescribed a game of tennis, he scarcely had time to think of the pain, which in fact failed to appear.  However, as he thereafter insisted on eating four eggs a day,—­with eggs at top-notch price I decided that the joke was on the doctor!

=Enjoying the Right Things.= In substituting healthful complexes for unhealthful ones, psychotherapy not only changes ideas and emotions, but alters the feelings of pleasure or pain that are bound up with the ideas.  Dr. Tom A. Williams writes:  “The essence of psychotherapy and education is to associate useful activities with agreeable feeling-tones and to dissociate from injurious acts the agreeable feeling-tones that may have been acquired.”  Right character consists not so much in enjoying things as in enjoying the right things.