ABSTRACT
Novel scientific conceptions are wont to be received with a measure of mistrust and disbelief that quite oversteps the limits of objectivity and betrays marked hostility. Many patients start the treatment with an exaggerated ecstasy of belief; they accept all explanations without distinction, and are never weary of singing the praises of the new method. These are the cases that may give the beginner wrong ideas of the rapidity and promptitude of the effects of psychoanalysis. Children with a precociously developed reality sense only carry out to a certain extent the demand for the partial repression of their powers of judgement. While ‘rational’ (more correctly, rationalizing) and suggestive hypnotic psycho-therapies wish to influence patients intellectually or emotively without considering the conditions necessary for the development of convictions and insight of sufficient import to modify the psychic attitude hitherto held, Freudian psycho-analysis demands full consideration of the intellectual as well as of the feeling life.
