ABSTRACT
Many people from lack of information regard psychoanalysis as a therapy that acts ‘suggestively’. Psycho-analysis stands upon the firm foundation of the strict determinism of psychic happenings. Above all it drops the assumption according to which so-called ‘imaginary illnesses’ are unfounded, akin to simulation or absurd. While hypnotism and suggestion either simply deny the evil or endeavour to bury it more deeply, but really leave it to smoulder in the depths of the mind like the glow under ashes, psychoanalysis hunts energetically for the cause of the illness, digs the fire, as it were, out of the ashes and extinguishes it on its hearth. Analysis changes pathological grief into physiological grief, and thereby makes it accessible to the healing influences of time and life upon the feelings, just as the antique work of art whelmed in the earth remains intact only so long as it remains there.
