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Permit me now to correct a few mistakes that have been made in regard to this cathartic or analytic method of psychotherapy, and to give a few explanations on the subject.

(a) I have observed that this method is very often confused with hypnotic treatment by suggestion; I have noticed this because it happens comparatively often that colleagues who do not ordinarily confide their cases to me send me patients refractory patients, of course - with a request that I should hypnotize them. Now I have not used hypnosis for therapeutic purposes for some eight years (except for a few special experiments) so that I habitually send back these cases with the recommendation that anyone who relies upon hypnosis may employ it himself. There is, actually, the greatest possible antithesis between suggestive and analytic technique - the same antithesis which, in regard to the fine arts, the great Leonardo da Vinci summed up in the formulas: per via di porre and per via di levare. Painting, says Leonardo, works per via di porre, for it applies a substance - particles of colour - where there was no thing before, on the colourless canvas; sculpture, however, proceeds per via di levare, since it takes away from the block of stone all that hides the surface of the statue contained in it. In a similar way, the technique of suggestion aims at proceeding per via di porre; it is not concerned with the origin, strength and meaning of the morbid symptoms, but instead, it superimposes something - a suggestion - in the expectation that it will be strong enough to restrain the pathogenic idea from coming to expression. Analytic therapy, on the other hand, does not seek to add or to introduce anything new, but to take away something, to bring out something; and to this end concerns itself with the genesis of the morbid symptoms and the psychical context of the pathogenic idea which it seeks to remove. It is by the use of this mode of investigation that analytic therapy has increased our knowledge so notably. I gave up the suggestive technique, and with it hypnosis, so early in my practice because I despaired of making suggestion powerful and enduring enough to effect permanent cures. In every severe case I saw the suggestions which had been applied crumble away again; after which the disease or some substitute for it was back once more. Besides all this I have another reproach to make against this method, namely, that it conceals from us all insight into the play of mental forces; it does not permit us, for example, to recognize the resistance with which the patient clings to his disease and thus even fights against his own recovery; yet it is this phenomenon of resistance which alone makes it possible to understand his behaviour in daily life.