We can now understand in what manner the psychotherapeutic method propounded by us exerts its curative effect. It abrogates the efficacy of the original not ab-reacted presentation of affording an outlet to the strangulated affect through speech. It brings it to associative correction by drawing it into normal consciousness (in mild hypnosis) or it is done away with through the physician's suggestion just as happens in somnambulism with amnesia.
We maintain that the therapeutic gain obtained by applying this process is quite significant. To be sure we do not cure the hysterical predisposition as we do not block the way for the recurrence of hypnoid states; moreover, in the productive stage of acute hysteria our procedure is unable to prevent the replacement of the carefully abrogated phenomena by new ones. But when this acute stage has run its course and its remnants continue as persistent hysterical symptoms and attacks, our radical method usually removes them forever, and herein it seems to surpass the efficacy of direct suggestion as practiced at present by psychotherapists.
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