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It is sufficient to take up any newspaper between New York and San Francisco and run through the advertisements of the spiritualists and psychical mediums, the palmists and the astrologers, the spiritual advisers and the psychotherapists: it is evident that it is a regular organized industry which brings its steady income to thousands, and which in the bigger towns has its red-light districts with its resorts for the intellectual vice.

But for us as psychotherapists all those factors have no moral value but only a therapeutic one, and thus stand in line with any other influence that may help, even though from a purposive point of view it stands on a much lower level.

There would be almost a year of unremitting agony, physical and mental, worse than a Khiftan torture rack. There would be the shame of having his innermost secrets poured out of him by the psychotherapists, and, at the end, there would emerge someone who would not be Salgath Trod, or anybody like Salgath Trod, and he would have to learn to know this stranger, and build a new life for him.

If we take the strictly religious standpoint the situation is of course different, but if we speak of psychophysiological effects, we may acknowledge the healing influence of prayer and yet rely in the special case still more on bromide or strychnine. Yet the religious psychotherapists not only neglect the physical help but usually emphasize the antagonism.

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.